10
Katonah, New York
In Miranda’s den, they sit looking at a computer monitor on top of a secretary desk. Even blown up on the larger, higher-resolution screen, the symbols on the photo of Weiss’s whiteboard are blurred and hard to comprehend. But Miranda click and drags her cursor over the faint images, a digital marker tracing over the curves and lines of the letters and numbers, turning the faint to bold and bringing the letters and numbers to life.
What emerges is a chart of seven boxes, beginning on Saturday and ending on Friday.
In the box for Saturday is the number sequence 12.42-6.
There are two sequences for Sunday: MSPH366259 and the words brotherly to us?
Under Monday are the numbers 3.340-6 and the word Tech?
Under Tuesday, 6.88-90.
Under Wednesday, 18.55-57
Thursday, 17.594-9
Friday’s numbers—9.11—are accompanied by two exclamation points—!!—written in red.
Sloppily scrawled across the middle of the board, overlapping some of the numbers, is this passage: DH—The gods may love a man, but they can’t help him when cold death comes to lay him at his bier.
DH, Havens thinks. He’s talking to me. He’s passing this off on me.
When Miranda is done highlighting the faded numbers and letters, Havens says, “I have no idea what to do with these numbers. There’s no sequence, no discernible pattern. The only thing I recognize is this”—he points to the box for Saturday—“12.42-6. Weiss sent me that same note while I was at the club.” He pulls out his phone. Miranda leans over while he scrolls through. “First he wrote this: Wilt thou not be brotherly to us? The next was Berlin. 12.42-6. Then, Help 3.338-9.”
Miranda types into the search box on her Internet browser while Havens sifts through his texts. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“The gods may love a man, but they can’t help him when cold death comes to lay him at his bier.” She turns and looks at him. “You have to see more than numbers, Drew. Words matter when human beings are part of the equation.” She clicks search and bends closer. “And these words,” she continues, “are some of the oldest and most profound ever written. They’re from Book Three of The Odyssey, by Homer.”
He stares at the words, then back at her, but she’s typing again: “Wilt thou not be brotherly to us?” She clicks, then taps at the onscreen result and nods. “Odysseus.”
Havens straightens up and closes his eyes.
She asks, “What was the number he wrote after he texted Help?”
With eyes still closed, he recites, “3.338-9.” She types. “Yup. Book Three, Lines 338 to 339.” They both look at the other numbers on the chart. Then, “What’s the other one that he sent you, from Saturday?”
“12.42-46,” he answers, again without having to look at the chart or his texts.
She types, then waits. “This may not be totally accurate line for line, because there are a million versions of this, based upon the Latin and Greek translations, but the books and the general section should be close. Here:
Square in your ship’s path are Seirenes, crying
Beauty to bewitch men coasting by . . .
He stares at the words. No answer for this. He thinks. “Type in this, ‘Murder at Hang Seng.’”
“Please,” she says, an old issue between them.
“Yes, please. ‘‘Murder at Hang Seng.’”
Within seconds they find several news service accounts of Hang Seng trader Patrick Lau’s death, but little else. After a moment he hands over the flash drive and says, “It’s Danny’s software. God knows how or why he got it. Let’s search Lau and Hang Seng on this.”
She looks at him.
“Pretty please.”
Within minutes they’re accessing Lau’s private e-mail accounts as well as all of his accounts at Hang Seng. Havens instantly recognizes the connection between the stocks that Lau moved and the holdings in the Rising Fund. Also, this: “Berlin,” which leads him to Siren Securities.
After they hack into Siren, they discover the transactions involving new media stocks out of Dubai and, this morning, old media out of Johannesburg. All through Siren, all mirroring the holdings of the Rising Fund.
“Whoever’s doing these plays,” Havens marvels, “it’s as if they read my mind, playing the opposite—total shorts—to Salvado’s longs.”
“So that’s a link?”
“More like an anti-link.”
Miranda grunts. “Why would he publicly bet his career that something is going to be a major success and then privately bet that it will fail?”
Havens chews his lip. “Not just fail. Epic fail. For starters, if these plays do happen to fail, the people who hold the shorts stand to make much more money than those who have the much safer play on their success—including anyone associated with The Rising. The odds against this type of failure are much greater and the payoff that much higher.”
“Yet, hypothetically, he holds both positions.”
“One that he wants the world to know about and the other that he’d apparently kill to keep secret.”
“How does he know that they will fail?”
“I’m not sure. Nothing indicates that any of those companies or plays is in any kind of trouble. Me, I wouldn’t go heavily into any of them, one way or the other, but especially short.”
Miranda rises, glances at the window. “What if,” she begins, “Salvado knows that they’ll fail because he’s going to do something to make them fail?”
“Okay.”
“What if he’s placing these bets because he’s going to initiate some kind of action, some incident, that will set the failures in motion?”
Havens nods. “This, essentially, is Danny Weiss’s theory. The same way that Al-Qaeda supposedly gamed the market with twenty-eight trades prior to 9/11, Weiss felt that Salvado was going to game it. ‘This time: 7 Trades. Not 28.’ His last message to me.”
“Which would imply that there’s another four trades to come, and maybe four more killings to go with them.”
“Right,” Havens says. “But which trades, which traders, where, and what ‘event’ do they ramp up to?”
“And the reason that you think these transactions and these murders are happening in different countries is to dilute the focus and make them harder to link and track?”
Havens nods again, then something occurs to him. “So far he’s made these trades in three separate countries, right? Each with some kind of link to Germany. Berlin, which Weiss mentioned in his last text.”
Miranda squints, shakes her head less than an inch each way. She’s not making the connection. “And the fact that they’re all American assets, that’s what the Salvado connection is all about?”
“Yeah. But no. What I mean is, because they’re almost all U.S.-based, even if the market is being made overseas, they have to somehow be linked to an American trading account, opened by a genuine American human with a Social Security number and, in theory, a traceable name and address.”
“I’m sorry, but I still don’t get it. Why go to these extremes? Why do it at all? Why would a man worth, what, billions, risk everything to do something so criminal and horrible?”
Havens shrugs. He agrees. It makes no sense.
For another hour they look at the cryptic numbers and letters of Danny Weiss’s whiteboard. They look up passages from various editions of The Odyssey, but no airtight narrative emerges. No absolute explanation of what was and what’s next.
After one extended silence Havens points at the on-screen photo and asks, “Can you print me a few copies of this to take with me?”
“Sure. But where are you going?”
“Back to the city.”
“Drew. There’s not another train for hours. Why don’t you get some rest?”
He stares at the closed blinds, then he sees for the first time the picture on the end table across the room. In it he’s sleeping in a beach chair near the ocean’s edge in Montauk and Erin is sleeping with her arms wrapped around him and her head on his chest. Best and worst picture ever.
She follows his eyes to the photo. When she looks back, she sees that his eyes are closed and that his hands are trembling. Her right hand reaches out, floats away from her almost involuntarily, and rests on top of his. She stands. Still holding one of his hands, she grabs the other, and whispers, “I want to help.”
He shakes his head. A truck rumbles past. Its diesel churn rattles the windows. “I shouldn’t have come. You’re right. I came out of selfishness. Because I needed to . . . because I needed.”
She pulls, coaxes him to rise.
“Did you ever think it was because of the money? That if we had rejected it . . .”
“It wouldn’t have prevented anything.”
“So many good people lost so much while we . . . It’s as if . . .”
She shakes her head with conviction.
“If anything else happens to you, Mir, because of me . . .”
“Drew. Stop. Please stop.”
Standing, knees weak, hands still shaking in the warmth of hers, he looks at Miranda, the only woman he’s ever loved, the mother of his child, once and former and always wife, and he thinks about their bleak and raw bond, and the flawed and broken kind of love that only they could begin to understand, and which will not go away.
All the things that matter, far more than the machinations of Rick Salvado and the violent whims of the rich and power-mad, more than his own dire predicament, register in their embrace. Love. Death. Resentment. Hate. Fear. Mourning. Remorse. They feel the compacted emotions and memories of a marriage, from when he first met her waiting in the rain under the entrance to the Astor Place subway stop, a shy grade school English teacher in ripped jeans, with auburn hair covered by an Irish wool cap, studying for her master’s at night at NYU, to the recently wealthy former grade school teacher turned not-for-profit board member with impeccable blond processed hair, wearing a two-thousand-dollar pantsuit, punching him in the chest on the sidewalk outside the hospital that night.
She kisses him while his eyes are still closed. He pulls her tight against him and she digs her fingers into his back. She cries as she kisses and claws at him, at once punishing and rewarding, resenting and caressing.
They stumble into her room and make a different kind of love, flawed and broken, bleak and raw, regretting it before it happens and while it happens, yet not being able to control themselves, and not wanting it to end. Amazed that something so primal and desperate once produced a thing as beautiful as a child.