Ulster County, New York City
Ethan’s right arm traverses a wilderness of twisted bedsheet. “Zoe?” he says. But the house remains still. Growing more awake, Ethan feels as though he is surfacing through quicksand. His body is sore, aching, torn. Gingerly he touches the back of a shoulder. Blood.
He and Zoe had never before made violent love, but last night they had collided as though she were trying to obliterate herself, as though she needed to erase her memory.
Could he have refused her then, when she joined him under the sheets and the familiarity of her body defeated him? Beyond this he’d wanted her to know that, whatever her heritage, she was a whole and pure being. Was this some kind of love he had for her?
But Zoe wanted something meaner, to be split in two. Perhaps she had used him. And that was fine. Except now she was gone.
“Zoe,” Ethan calls more loudly.
Upright finally, he goes to a window and lifts the shade. Squinting, he tries to glimpse Zoe’s fugitive form outside.
“Zoe!” he calls again, and then has a moment of panic. His BlackBerry, battery dead since yesterday, sits on one of Zoe’s night tables, next to a digital clock decorated with stickers. There is a princess phone there, too. An antique landline. He dials a number and hears a voice that he sometimes finds amusing, sometimes obnoxious.
“Hashtag mystery caller—”
Ethan cuts John Guan off before he can start a riff. “It’s Ethan. Everything cool? Did you cover for me?” He had left Guan a voicemail from the hospital room. UIB gives its employees five personal days a year, but nobody uses them. He’d already taken one for the funeral and two was bad form, indicating a lack of dedication. But this is not what’s making him nervous. Being incommunicado for twenty-four hours is the big worry. Hopefully Guan has been watching his back.
“Yo, mofo. It be ten a.m. and tickin’. Where you at, homey?” Guan’s attempt to sound ghetto is more exaggerated than usual. Not a good sign.
“Okay, John. What’s wrong?” Ethan asks.
“Apocalypse now,” Guan says. “We’ve shut down the currency mainframe. It started buying rupees at ten times their value. The bank took a major hit. Don’t tell me you got no alerts—oh, right, your phone’s down. Bummer. Rumor is one of your algos spazzed.”
“One of my algos . . . bullshit.”
Guan’s voice for once sounds serious, like there’s a real person beneath all the blather. “There was another Middle East thing. You know this stuff better than me. Pakistan. Car bomb. Dead American contractor. This yada-yada-whatever group claiming responsibility. Revenge for the al-Yarisi drone hit. That’s all your territory, bro.”
“Hold the fort. It’ll take me two hours to get back to the city.”
“Yo, but like we are talking Fort Apache, white man. You better watch your scalp.”
Ethan hangs up and puts on clothes sour from the previous day and night. Tramping downstairs, he calls out again, “Zoe! Zoe?”
There is no reply, only a bang like the sound of a screen door. Following the noise Ethan comes to the kitchen. He stands a moment on the creaking linoleum. A cigarette smolders in a small dish filled with butts. A breeze wafts from the screened side door. Ethan pushes out onto a landing with steps that descend into the backyard. “Zoe!” he shouts from the railing. But there is no answer.
On the drive out of Ulster County, Ethan repositions his concerns. Zoe knows how to take care of herself. Again, he has been stupid about her. Again, she has taken what she has wanted and left him hanging. Meanwhile, he mentally backtracks through his last hours at work. Before he’d left to visit her, he had adjusted a formula that would signal the bank’s computers to trade the rupee against the renminbi against the dollar, a triangular arbitrage, in the event of a terrorist incident, of which that Pakistan car bomb would qualify.
Through his mind’s eye, Ethan reviews his code. He had made only simple tweaks, nothing that required testing or managerial verification, just no-brainer refinements. Of course, he had put in a fifteen-hour day and was jazzed on energy drinks toward the end. Could he have screwed up?
Nah.
Yet . . . what if he had shifted a decimal point the wrong way, keyed his algo to bid for rupees at ten times their worth? In the event of a terrorist attack, the bank would essentially be trading dollars at one-tenth their value. This would suck ass. This would cause a run on UIB’s dollar holdings, costing tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands before the fail-safes shut the system down. If they shut it down. Jesus, he thinks. The damage could be in the millions. Tens of millions.
Dumping the Zipcar outside the UIB tower Ethan hustles inside to the elevator. On the twenty-seventh floor, rushing past cubicles as their occupants stare over the partitions, Dwayne Hoke rushes out and shoves him against a wall.
“What the fuck, Dwayne,” Ethan says as Hoke breathes into his face. A former lacrosse captain at Duke, his boss outweighs him by thirty pounds.
“Where were you yesterday, asshole? Penthouse conference room. Five minutes,” Dwayne says and walks off. Such public dramas are how Hoke maintains office discipline.
It might be easier to go back and jump down the elevator shaft. Nevertheless, Ethan continues his walk of shame past his co-workers to his office. It resembles Macy’s after Black Friday. His desk drawers are upside down on the floor. His three computers are gone, leaving eviscerated cables. No doubt UIB data forensics is sifting every byte and scrap for evidence of something. Fraud, most likely. His bosses can be very suspicious: Barings in England had gone under because of one employee’s unauthorized speculations. In France, Société Générale had needed governmental help to stay solvent after a trader went rogue. At J.P. Morgan, a bond trader called the London Whale hid billions in losses. Etcetera. Ethan wonders if he is soon to be mistakenly ranked among these villains, soon to be frog-marched to jail in handcuffs. Few things are salvageable in such a situation and a job is not one of them. One last time he settles into the caress of his thousand-dollar ergonomic programmer’s chair.
Leaning back, Ethan notices a glint inside his desk where the center drawer used to be. Forensics has missed the penknife from the career fair where UIB recruited him, where they were poaching bachelor’s of science students from the true sciences. Inscribed in gold on the black handle is the suggestion CUT THE BS. GET YOUR MFE. Ethan did and went after a master’s in financial engineering, taking some serious financial aid from UIB in exchange for his future.
For the first time Ethan has a real use for the knife. He takes off his coat and, like an art thief, starts sawing Alex’s Demimonde in D Minor out of its frame. It is his favorite of the three paintings of Alex’s that Ethan has hung in his office. He won’t risk losing it to UIB.
“Whoa, chief,” a familiar voice says. “What you be doin’?” John Guan has snuck up behind him.
“This is mine!” Ethan says, sounding even to himself a little crazed. In his windowless office Alex’s paintings had connected him to a world beyond his number-splitting work.
“My man, you know you’re bleeding through your shirt back,” Guan says. “The Hoke-man do that? There’s talk of an incident in the bullpen.”
Ethan has Demimonde almost free when a pair of UIB security men arrive and one of them twists Ethan’s cutting arm and efficiently places him facedown onto the floor.
“Sir, you are no longer authorized to be in this office,” his partner says.
Meanwhile the man who put Ethan onto the ground helps him to his feet. “Your bloody shirt is not on me, mate,” he says in his Australian accent and then helps Ethan into his coat.
Upstairs, exiting the penthouse elevator, Ethan and his guards traverse a glassy foyer monitored by Cassandra, who could be a Victoria’s Secret model. As Ethan passes she offers him a smile. And then his guards simultaneously open in front of him the double doors to a conference room that gleams with polished wood and smells of leather.
Like all executive conference rooms in lower Manhattan, this one contains a table the length of a pier. New Jersey is visible through the glass wall, along with Ellis Island. In Ethan’s five years at the bank he has entered this space only twice and has always been one among dozens. This time he completes a group of three.
Hoke lunges at Ethan like a hungry hyena. “Didn’t hurt you downstairs, did I, buddy?” he asks and claps a hand on Ethan’s damaged shoulder. Hoke pushes him the length of the table toward a man studying papers laid out on the reflective mahogany.
The stranger, who has high cheekbones and silver hair pulled into a ponytail, rises and offers Ethan his hand. “How are you, Mr. Winter. Ben Littletree from legal. We have documents awaiting your signature. After that, you can be on your way.”
“On my way?” Ethan asks.
Littletree lifts his eyebrows at Hoke.
“You’re fired,” Hoke says, doing his best Trump imitation. “What did you think? The upside for you is that UIB’s not going to take this to the feds.”
Ethan’s nape hairs bristle. Pride begs him not to go down easily. “The feds? For a decimal point mistake, if it was even that?”
“I’m just saying, buddy,” Hoke says. “We can be really hard on you if you want. You should have seen the uproar around here when your program kicked in. Good thing the fail-safes worked. We’re still looking into a conspiracy to manipulate.”
“A conspiracy?”
“With currency traders at other banks.”
Ethan shakes his head. Then he glances at the waiting paperwork. “Maybe my lawyer should see these first.”
Littletree takes over. “Mr. Winter, these papers simply restate what’s in your employment contract addendum.”
“Meaning?” Ethan asks.
“Well, that you agree to indemnify UIB against any losses caused up to the amount of your secondary compensation.”
“Meaning?” Ethan repeats.
“Well, buddy,” Hoke says. Despite their weight difference, Ethan is ready to hit him. “That currency mainframe was down for twenty minutes before Guan got it back up. That’s major dollars. It basically means you pay back your bonuses from the past few years. It’s what we all had to agree to here, after the meltdown.”
The meltdown. Ethan has not seriously considered the meltdown since the protesters exited Zuccotti Park. In the banking universe, the meltdown is Roman history. But apparently some artifacts remain. After Lehman blew up in ’08 and the world nearly followed, UIB tossed a bone to the Fed by tying employee bonuses to long-term performance, claiming a claw-back clause would prevent shortsighted trading.
Of course UIB’s executives and stars were exempt from the clause. They could still day trade as aggressively as any aspiring white-collar criminal. But employees at Ethan’s level—the counters and geeks—would have their bonuses clawed back if their trading ultimately resulted in red ink.
And so, calculating his bonuses as three-fourths of his income, Ethan is about to lose . . . let’s see, carry the decimal point . . . everything. His six-figure bank account. His retirement investments. His platinum credit limit. Perhaps even his condo.
In the previous century the sin of losing money was forgivable. Bankruptcy was lenient. The rich were neither so rich nor so greedy nor so paranoid. But with the American century shrinking in the rearview mirror, the country has given up on being the land of second chances, or even first. Basically, the new millennium sucks for latecomers.
Ethan swats Littletree’s papers off the table and turns his back on Hoke. The security team grabs him up and escorts him down to the gum-splotched New York sidewalk. He feels like a hatchling ejected from the nest.