The Devil's Banker

Chapter 16

It was a king’s fortune. Two hundred seventy-one million four hundred fifty-nine thousand dollars and three cents. He had sold his last share of stock, covered his last call, closed out his last option. For the first time in two decades his portfolios stood empty. The three screens on his desk broadcasting real-time account information blinked like a barren New Age triptych. For a few minutes anyway, the sum total of twenty years’ obsessive effort rested in his cash account. Every last cent.

Marc Gabriel stared at the numbers, feeling nothing: not contentment, not pride, not avarice. Long ago, he’d acquired the professional trader’s ice-cold objectivity. If anything, he relished the coming challenge, and the warrior’s daring flared in his eyes. Money was the ultimate weapon. Everything had been a prelude to this moment.

Two hundred seventy million dollars.

He could have used it to buy a yacht in Antibes, a two-hundred-foot Suncruiser with a helicopter deck aft and a crew of ten. He could have purchased a finca in Ibiza, a chalet in Zermatt, and an estate near Chenonceau, and had enough left over for lavish parties, the finest clothing, a lifetime of waste. Gabriel wanted none of it. He owned something far more valuable already. A cause.

Pushing aside his pain baignat, he slipped his earpiece into place and murmured to himself, “Two seventy. Let’s see what we can do with it.”

“Gruezi, Heini,” he said to his banker in Zurich, his Swiss-German dialect nearly perfect. “New strategy. Don’t be shocked and don’t ask why. Richemond is going short big-time. Got a pencil? Short ten thousand IBM, ten thousand 3M, ten thousand Merck, ten thousand Microsoft…” he went on, listing the industrial stalwarts of the United States before traveling round the globe to visit his doomsday doctrine on Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong. In every country he picked only the most heavily traded issues. He shorted consumer goods, electronics, drugs, and paper products; financials, insurance, entertainment, and lodging. He avoided only one sector: defense.

When he finished with Zurich, he called Madrid, and did it again. And when he was finished with Madrid, he called Dublin, Frankfurt, Mexico City, and Johannesburg.

“We’re shorting this market,” he said, over and over again, but when pressed, offered no explanation for his pessimistic view, other than to say that prices were “overvalued.”

To “go short” meant to sell a stock you didn’t own in hopes its share price would decrease and you could buy it back at a lower level. The idea was to sell at a hundred, wait for bad news to drive the price down, then buy it back at fifty, giving yourself a fifty-dollar gain. Shorting was just buying and selling in reverse.

It wasn’t quite that simple. Officially, you had to borrow the stock. If the stock’s price increased-if it “moved against you”-you could be forced to buy it back from the true owner at the higher price. (But only if he wanted to sell it then and there, and if there were no other shares for sale that could be substituted.) Dividends were also your responsibility and were debited to your account. These were technicalities, however. What mattered in the end was that, even if you didn’t officially own the stock, you got to keep the proceeds of the sale.

Mostly, you needed three things to short a stock. Balls, good credit, and information. It was up to the trader to supply the first. Brokerage houses were generous in extending the second. Financial firms were as greedy as any other for-profit business in the Western world, and they liked to give their customers ample rope with which to hang themselves. A good client like Marc Gabriel with his Richemond Holdings was allowed to sell a hundred dollars of stock for every twenty-five dollars he kept in his account. A margin ratio of twenty-five percent. As for information, Gabriel didn’t have any nasty secrets about any one particular company hidden up his sleeve. No news about a pending lawsuit, a deal gone sour, or a failed technology. He was privy to a more violent brand of information. News that would adversely impact every stock in every market around the world.

An hour after he’d begun, the screens buzzed with life and showed his accounts to be valued at just over one billion dollars.

Nine zeroes.

Gabriel steepled his fingers thoughtfully.

He had begun in 1980, a twenty-one-year-old neophyte out of the London School of Economics with a degree in finance, a convert’s zeal, and a kitty of four million dollars, equal parts his father’s pension and donations from like-minded friends. He almost lost it all several times, and the recollection of those early white-knuckle trades, the endless weekends with open, unhedged positions, the sleepless nights with bankruptcy looming overhead, was enough to bring on a nervous sweat.

Then came the nineties, a ten-year bull run in the West and the destruction of the Nikkei in the East. He bet big with Soros against the pound, and rode the back of the Japanese market all the way down on its suicide leap from 36,000 to a quarter that level. Meanwhile, he’d bought IBM at 50 and sold at a split-adjusted 200.

The boom in Internet stocks was the capper, and to his pious eye, all the indication he needed that God was on his side. Yahoo, Netscape, Inktomi, and Akamai. He rode them up, up, up. If his analyst’s eye told him the stocks were overvalued, his trader’s logic steadied him. “The trend is your friend” was the rule of the day, and he followed it as devoutly as he did his religion. He also knew the meaning of a “stop/loss,” and when to use it.

Along the way there were other deals, ventures into businesses legitimate and otherwise. Inteltech in Paraguay. Gropius Gems in Nigeria. The Allen Victor Metal company in Kazakhstan. He had vowed never to tamper with his capital, and the steady revenues generated by ongoing concerns were necessary for other more interesting sidelines.

Finished with the calls, Gabriel walked to the kitchenette and poured coffee into a chipped porcelain cup. As he sipped the strong desert brew, he lit a cigarette and stared at the blinking screens, at the scuffed briefcase sitting next to the desk, and at the rest of his abandoned office. Drawers yawned from the polished teak filing cabinets. Gilt-framed oils stared down from paneled walls. Most were still-lifes, sterile depictions of fruit, fowl, and fish purposely chosen to reveal nothing of his tastes or background. They would stay. He hated them, anyway. Photographs of smiling children, a lovely blond wife, and a pair of Yorkshire terriers adorned the credenza and a visitors’ coffee table. They would stay, too. The subjects were complete strangers. He didn’t know one of them. Except the dogs.

Setting down his coffee, he walked to the printer next to his desk and snatched a sheaf of paper. The top page showed the layout of a building. He skipped past the first floor, the second floor-ah, here it was-he slipped the page showing the third floor on top, and took a seat. Running a nail across the page, he quickly located the burn unit. Consulting his notes from an earlier conversation, he jotted down a few names, then added the most crucial information: Room 310. 10 A.M.

He shook his head, a little bewildered at the speed of events.

It was all moving so fast now.

The phone had rung at four-thirty that morning. Gabriel had been awake, showered and dressed in business attire, seated in his private study at his home in the leafy, upmarket quartier of Neuilly. He was listening to the BBC World Service broadcast news of the death of one Abu Sayeed, a high-level member of Hijira, a heretofore unknown Islamic extremist group. He was wondering who had tipped off the Americans.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I shall be arriving in Paris, the day after tomorrow. Sometime in the afternoon. Do you have the cash?”

Gabriel winced at the hard Israeli accent. “Of course. Do you have the package?”

“I do.”

Gabriel swallowed. The world had begun to spin on a new axis. “Do you need a place to stay while you’re here? I can arrange something.”

“I’m quite capable myself, thank you.”

“Shall we set a time to get together?”

“That would be impractical.”

A baby’s cry broke the morning still. Gabriel turned his head toward the noise. It would be Fayez, his seventh son, just a few weeks old. Suddenly, he wanted very badly to sit with his wife in the darkness and watch as she nursed the boy.

“I will contact you in forty-eight hours,” said the caller. “If you do not hear from me, presume I’ve been taken. I am not a brave man. I will talk. I do not know your true name, but you may wish to take precautions.”

“Good luck,” said Gabriel, hanging up.

The professor was on his way.

It was five o’clock. Gabriel had one last item to take care of. He sat at his desk, a commander of one. His eyes fell to his notepad. The name “Gregorio” was circled crazily, reflecting his own frustration. He picked up the phone and dialed the ten-digit number. A cheerful, Spanish-speaking woman answered. “Inteltech, buenos días.”

“Buenos días, Gloria,” said Gabriel, his own Spanish very good, but not fluent. “I would like to speak to Señor Gregorio, if you would be so kind.”

“Señor Gregorio is not in-”

“Gloria,” Gabriel cut in, steel in his voice. “Pass me to Señor Gregorio. Immediately.”

“Sí, Jefe.”

The faint hum of Latin Muzak tickled his ear and he wondered why no one thought of broadcasting something uplifting instead of this insipid fare. A minute passed, and to his horror he discovered he was humming the tune. Disgusted, he bit his lip. It was insidious. The rot was everywhere. Even in a backwater like Ciudad del Este.

“Gregorio speaking.”

Marc Gabriel hunched forward and spoke. “Ah, I’m happy to have caught you, Pedro. There’s been a small misunderstanding.”

“Hello, Marc. A misunderstanding? What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“I am talking about the sum of twelve million dollars. The sum that you had promised to wire to our partner’s account last week. I’m certain it’s an oversight.”

With annual revenues of nearly seventy million dollars, Inteltech was a leader in the sales and distribution of over-the-counter software to the rapidly growing markets of Southeast Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. Last year, the company had shipped more than one million copies of Microsoft Office, Lotus Development, and Corel WordPerfect. It was a lovely business. Gross margins of eighty percent. No marketing costs. No advertising expenses. After the cost of goods sold, the largest below-the-line item constituted “official gratuities,” which Gabriel knew better as bribes to government officials. Every last copy Inteltech sold was a pirated, or “bootleg,” edition reproduced with the company’s proprietary counterfeiting technology. Richemond’s ninety percent stake in the company accounted for one of the holdings’ largest investments.

“An oversight on the bank’s behalf,” said Gregorio. “I can tell you I was on the phone screaming bloody murder. It’s terrible here. You have no idea. They have a completely different conception of time.”

“I can imagine,” said Gabriel agreeably, as he toyed with his letter opener. It was Gregorio who was the problem, however. Gregorio, who had an excuse for every occasion. Gregorio, who’d honed his lying skills as an executive at BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Pakistani financial institution whose spectacular flameout in the early nineties had earned it the moniker the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals Indicted.”

Gabriel continued. “Be that as it may, your primary responsibility is to see that our funds are transferred as directed.”

“Apologies, Jefe. I will call the bank immediately and see that it is carried out as soon as possible.”

“Not as soon as possible,” said Gabriel, pressing the point of the opener into his leg. “Now. This very instant. We no longer have use for this enterprise. Our energies are required at home. Your travel documents are in order?”

Again, Gregorio said yes.

“Very good. Go in peace.”

As Gabriel hung up, he could not ignore his lingering suspicions. “Señor Gregorio” could not be trusted. He’d been too long in the jungle, too long away from his people. The rot had consumed him.

Gabriel stood, adjusting his cuffs, tightening the knot of his tie, counting the days until he could be rid of the constricting clothing. The twelve million dollars was necessary, a crucial component to the lie. It must come from South America. It took him only a few moments to decide.

The professor was due in forty-eight hours.

There was time.

Before going home, he booked a flight for that evening to Buenos Aires with onward connections to Foz do Iguaçú, returning the next day, then reserved a motorbike, something nimble to negotiate the knotted traffic.

As he walked along the Rue Kleber, passing from the shade of one elm to the next, he carried the briefcase casually, letting it bang against his leg. A stiff wind had come up, and women were fighting to keep their dresses down and their hair in place. He checked the sky. Dark clouds were on the march from the north. Almost unconsciously, he checked over his shoulder. He saw nothing. It was Sayeed who was bothering him. Had he talked before dying? When had his death actually taken place? Facts were still sketchy. Gabriel had too few people on the ground, and news reports were unreliable.

He whistled a tune to distract himself. It took him a moment to recognize it as the same unpleasant ditty he’d heard while on hold to Gregorio. He stopped. Fishing in his jacket, he found his sunglasses and put them on. Hidden behind the mirrored lenses, no one could see the worry in his eyes.