16

New York City

“We’re looking for a guest. Miranda Havens.”

It’s a different clerk from the woman Miranda spoke to a half hour ago. This one, a man in his sixties, in early for the start of the 2 A.M. shift, has never heard of her.

“You know the room number?”

Havens shakes his head. “No. She’s my wife.”

The man looks at Havens and Cara Sobieski and shrugs. He’s seen kinkier over the years.

“She’s here, right?”

The man looks at his computer. Doesn’t say yes or no. “It’s late. I guess I can call the room, but I can’t give you the number.”

Havens nods, but isn’t optimistic. “I just tried her cell and she didn’t pick up.”

The clerk holds up his hands. “This is what I can do.”

“Fine. Sure. Thanks.”

The clerk dials and they wait. Clearly no one is picking up. The clerk holds out the still ringing phone. What now?

Havens tries a new approach: “Look. I was here two days ago. You can check my name in the system. Havens. Like hers. I have ID. I have my wedding picture with her.”

The clerk squints, thinking, You carry a wedding photo of your ex? “Sorry. But they have rules. Otherwise people would be breaking into rooms all the time.”

Sobieski leans on the counter and speaks for the first time. “Listen, this is important. We received an urgent message to meet her here.”

The clerk moves his reading glasses toward the tip of his nose to get a better look at her. “You a cop?”

“I’m a federal agent.”

“You have ID, a badge?”

Sobieski reaches into her back pocket, then remembers that her badge was last seen in the back pocket of a dead man on a Berlin sidewalk. Shit. She looks at Havens. Now what?

A woman shuffles out of the back room and walks behind the counter. She’s wearing a brown suede jacket and a yellow beret. To avoid additional work she makes a point of keeping her head down and ignoring Havens and Sobieski. It’s after 2 A.M. She’s off duty and wants to go home.

“How about this,” Havens pleads. “You take us up there. We go together and you open up the door and we take a quick look inside just to make sure everything’s okay.”

“I don’t know,” the male clerk says to the female clerk. “What do you think?” She still doesn’t look up, but she does grab the computer monitor and tilts it her way for a better look. Only when she sees Miranda Havens’s profile on the monitor does she look back at Havens. “What’s your name again?”

“Havens. I was . . .”

She raises her hand to shush him. “I have something for you.”

They all watch as she turns and removes the large envelope from the mail slot behind the counter.

He opens the envelope with his back turned to them and holds up the room key for the others to see. “Let’s go,” he says to Sobieski, moving toward the elevator.

On the way up he reads the short note from Miranda. “She says she’s been trying to reach me. And that they took Salvado’s wife away this afternoon.”

They don’t bother to knock. He inserts the key and swings open the door. He goes to the left, toward the bed and the sitting area, and Sobieski goes to the right, toward the bathroom. A moment later Sobieski joins him in the bedroom.

“I have no idea,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Maybe she’ll come back.”

“It’s what, three o’clock?” He lies back and closes his eyes. Miranda’s envelope is still in his left hand. He tries to think of where she might be but can only speculate on what happened to her.

Sobieski doesn’t sit. She takes Havens’s computer out of his bag and plugs it into an outlet next to the desk. Then she takes Heinrich Shultz’s flash drive out of her pocket and plugs it into a USB port on the side of the laptop.

While she waits for the computer to load, Havens stares at Miranda’s handwriting on the note and the outside of the envelope. He reaches inside and pulls out the pages. Fourteen in all. He stares at the first page for several seconds before moving on to the next and the next, allowing the breadth of information to register, and the hard data to inform the broader, increasingly troubling narrative.

“Come here,” Sobieski says. “There’s something I want to show you.”

His silence draws Sobieski away from the computer.

“What?”

He hands her the pages and says, “We have to stop this bastard.”

“You think he has your . . . wife?”

“One of his people has her. She knew someone was after her. That’s why she left this at the desk.”

The information revealed in the first file of Heinrich Shultz’s drive is straightforward. It lists the details of the first four trades: Hong Kong, Dubai, Johannesburg, and Rio. “Dublin and Toronto happened after he was killed,” Sobieski explains. They go over the list of the specific securities bundled within each trade, the amounts, and the instructions for how the trades were to be executed. In smaller, sub-ten-thousand-dollar “Smurfed” batches, to avoid detection by American authorities. Shultz’s alias for the trades he executed was Homer.

“As in Simpson?” Havens asks.

“No. As in The Odyssey.”

“Right.”

“Check this out . . .” She opens another file, points to a block of text, and reads:

 

10/17

“don’t stay too long away from home, leaving

your treasure there, and brazen suitors near;

they’ll squander all you have or take it from you . . .”

“The Odyssey?”

“Very good. I Googled it. There are two more, all from the same book, and different from yours. I think these were activation cues for people in the trade cities to execute the traders because somehow their plan was compromised. For instance, I know that Lau in Hong Kong put down matching personal shorts out of his private account, and Al Mar placed calls to his broker brother-in-law, which must have pissed off the leaders of this enough to wipe out every loose end.”

“Except Luhabe.”

“This is true.”

Havens leans in and reads:

 

10/18

“I stormed that place and killed the men who fought.

Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,

To make division, equal shares to all.”

 

10/19

“Stand clear, put up your sword;

let me but taste of blood. I shall speak true.”

To Sobieski, he says, “Siren/Ithaka Securities. Mr. Homer.”

The guy who killed Patrick Lau in Hong Kong had a Siren Securities logo on his briefcase. An ancient illustration of a woman.

Havens stands straight and reaches into his pocket. He pulls out the printout of Weiss’s whiteboard and hands it to Sobieski without looking at it. “This is the board I saw in Weiss’s apartment. He sent me the photo just before he was killed. Check out the unattached number sequences at the bottom of each page. I bet they match up to those passages. Chapter and page number.”

“Book, more likely,” Sobieski corrects. “Book and line numbers.”

“Right—”

“Already doing it,” she interrupts, typing. Two clicks later they have their first answer: “Yup: Book three, lines 340 to 346. Exact match. Then: Tuesday, 10/18. Book 6, lines 88 to 90.”

“So they were used to activate each trade. When the code for each passage appears, somewhere, execute the trade?”

Sobieski nods. “Execute the trade, then the trader. Makes sense.”

“What about the others?”

She searches online and then reads: “Rio: ‘A pity you have more looks than heart. You’d grudge a pinch of salt from your own larder to your own handy man. You sit here fat on others’ meat, and cannot bring yourself to rummage out a crust of bread for me.’”

Then, “Dublin. Eighteen, 55 to 57: ‘So the great soldier took his bow and bent it for the bowstring effortlessly. He drilled the axeheads clean, sprang, and decanted arrows on the door sill, glared, and drew again. This time he killed Antinous.’”

Then, “Toronto. Seventeen, 594 to 599: ‘A guest remembers all of his days that host who makes provisions for him kindly.’”

They look at each other. “I get it. So there was a trade execution quote or clue that was somehow posted for the financial guy, then an assassination cue for the killer in each city. Somebody likes The Odyssey. But other than revolving around violent imagery, the quotes seem almost random. What about the one for tomorrow on your sheet? There’s only one number, twenty-two. No line numbers.”

Sobieski scrolls through an online copy of The Odyssey. “The title of Book twenty-two,” she begins, “is ‘Death in the Great Hall.’”

Havens rubs his eyes and looks at Miranda’s note again. If she ran, where else would she have gone? If someone has her, who? And where?

“Shit is happening overseas,” Sobieski says. She’s standing, leaning over the laptop.

“What shit?”

“Copycat plays. People copying the other trades even more than before. Either they know what’s coming or they sense it and are going along for the ride.”

“Where?”

“Eastern Europe. Moscow. Georgia. Ukraine. Mumbai. Paris . . .” Then she pauses. “And . . . Hong Kong. Actually, most of it’s starting there.” Nello and Cheung have wasted no time sharing her inside information, she thinks.

While Sobieski talks, Havens runs his fingers along the rest of the envelope.

“All stocks?”

“Yup, even NYCRE. Short money is moving on all of them. Money and chatter.”

Havens thinks of Weiss. Thinks of 9/11 and the models he constructed the other night. How short money did indeed begin to move on airline, insurance, banking, and more than two dozen other securities in the days leading up to the attack. “Explain chatter.”

“The volume and velocity that certain words and phrases appear in phone, cellular, and digital networks around the world. Sort of like the number one Twitter trending topics of the apocalypse.”

“Trending the apocalypse,” Havens says. “If they’re onto it, and we’re onto it, is it safe to assume some good guys are as well?”

Sobieski’s mouth forms a grim frown. “Knowing something is up and knowing what it is are two different things, right?”