Sniper's Honor

Interlude in Tel Aviv I

You hunt them in the jungle of stuff. Any stuff. Commodities, derivatives, cash transfers, currency manipulations, oil futures, pork (pork!) futures, blood diamonds, anywhere stuff is exchanged for other stuff.

Gershon Gold knew the game, but you’d never guess him a hunter from the outside. He was in his mid-sixties, tending toward weight, very much commercial class of Israeli, a businessman, a financial planner, a retailer, what have you. He wore slacks and open-necked sport shirts, some of them attractive, most not. He wore square-framed black plastic eyeglasses, a Rolex knockoff (why spend all that money for a watch?), once combed his gone-to-gray hair over to the left, though of late had gone with more of a straight-back Meyer Lansky look that earned him all manner of ribbing from friends and wife. He liked black loafers with both wing-tip perforations and tassels. Of glamour, élan, pizzazz, grace, beauty, he had none, unlike the young Mossad high-speed operators who went in with blackened faces in camouflage tunics, suppressed Tavors at the ready. He was no Israeli fighter jock, those keen-eyed, Nomex-clad F-16 predators who prowled the skies, could down any MiG or put a rocket in a bull’s-eye from so close to the deck that the engine blasts riled up the dust.

“Gershon, watch your calories,” was what his wife yelled to him every morning as he left his snug bungalow in Herzliya, the northern suburb of Tel Aviv, for the four-minute drive to what to him was known as the Institute while the rest of the world called it Mossad, also in Herzliya. It was a complex of buildings dominated by a black glass cube nine stories tall. It was full of cubicles, and Gershon’s was on the third floor, with a window that looked out to the sea a few miles away, though the view was better from the upper floors, which he knew he would never see.

The third floor was the Anti-terror Section, and his subdivision was Economic Intelligence. In other words, the theory and practice of stuff.

For eight, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty hours a day, he methodically searched for stuff, and it was why he was as much a hunter as the special-forces op or the fighter jock. He lurked in the fringes of a thousand or so markets that could be monitored from cyberspace. The price of coffee in Jakarta, the fall of the yuan in China, the peach-harvest projections in Azerbaijan, the impact of Schwinn’s new “comfo-bot-m” seat on the bicycle market, particularly as it presaged Schwinn’s controversial decision to target-market the aging baby-boomer population, the cost of an RPG-7 in open trade in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan. That kind of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Melons, tennis balls, grenades, infrared sighting devices, Frisbees (a comeback? looked so for a bit, but today’s reports were depressing), Maytag dishwashers in Kuwait, American varietals in the South of France (taking coals to Newcastle!), Duncan yo-yos in South Korea, black-market Duncan yo-yos in North Korea.

There was nothing arbitrary in his nosiness. International Terror fed on stuff. It needed, no matter the perpetrator, the ideological fervor or bent, a constant influx of money to keep itself on track. Money for training, money for travel, money for bribery, money for expertise, money for food and shelter; everything cost, and like General Motors, the conglomerate that was International Terror — he called it InterTer, Inc. — had been hurt badly by the recession, so it was ever on the hustle for a sugar daddy.

Any time there was an aberration, a seeming random happening outside the parameters of the established, it was an indicator that someone was moving product somewhere in some market that would result in a payoff of stuff that would be translated into currency that would purchase plastic explosive, 5.45x39mm ammo, RPGs, or even more efficient and sophisticated instruments, electronics, missiles, long-range radios, artillery, atomic weapons, anything for the destruction of fellow humans. That aberration had to be looked at, analyzed, parsed, and evaluated. Almost always it was nothing, but nobody could be sure it would always be nothing, and so the game went on, 24/7, the world over.

The intelligence agencies who fought the war had long known this, and Israel’s EconIntel unit was no different, really, than those fielded by any country, but for one respect: the Israelis had a secret weapon; and its name was Gershon Gold.

Today, which was like every other day, turned out to be the day of COMEX. He selected his markets randomly, off a simple program he had devised that pulled names out of a big hat. It had to be random. It couldn’t be by pattern, because a pattern could be detected, and any savvy programmer counterplaying him could recognize him. Not that there was anywhere on earth an indication that such a counterprogrammer existed, but he wanted to be thorough, careful, diligent, patient. In the long haul, that was how you won.

COMEX was the international commodities exchange, run by the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was a total universe of stuff. Gershon attacked it.

He monitored each commodity’s performance over a week, quickly translating the figures into a line graph. In units of twenty he projected those lines in space, with time (the week) as the horizontal variable and percentage change as the vertical variable. In normal operations the twenty lines should look pretty much the same, because each line reflected the wisdom of the market in representing value over the same period of time, in the same play of psychological and external factors. That is, in normal operating process, if gold went up a bit, so would tin, lemons, pork futures, and magnesium. The twenty lines, though at different value sectors, would pretty much reflect one another. That was defined as normality, especially when Gershon incorporated his proprietary algorithms to factor in weather and other variables not under anyone’s influence.

You could easily engineer a program to certain parameters, and it could mechanistically make this sort of examination and notify its keepers of something unusual, but it really needed a human eye, a human touch, a human instinct to make the final discriminations. That was Gershon.

Twenty by twenty he went, and nowhere was there any indication of abnormality. On and on until he was done and it all seemed okay, and finally it was time to put COMEX down and come up with another market for similar scrutiny.

Except…

He’d noticed a tiny little something, almost, not quite a blip.

It was in a midrange cluster of twenty across the value/time index. He went back and called it up and looked very closely. It seemed fine.

But…

There was one line with a peak just a little bit out of scale with the echoing peaks above and below.

Hmmm.

Is this real? Is it anything? Could it be anything?

He moused to that one line, selected it, and made the others go away.

A single line zagged across the graph.

He checked the legend.

PL.

What the hell was PL? The slightly higher value meant that someone had bought more PL than the market average. He went back through iterations, looking at the performance of PL over the past year, week by week, and in no single week had there been as big a leap.

What was going on with PL?

Actually, better start somewhere else.

What was PL?

It was platinum.