Clawback (4 page)

Quint Ganderson was a tall, jut-jawed, broad-shouldered cliché
in lane five, wearing clear Oakley shooting glasses and a SWAT cap. He saw me coming but finished off the entire magazine of his matte-black submachine gun before putting the barrel up.

“Nice shooting,” I said. His target was shredded. Bullet holes all over the place.

“Silas Cade?” He let the weapon fall forward in his left hand and reached out to shake with the other. “Didn’t bring a gun, did you?”

To Connecticut’s third-most-expensive country club? “I never carry unless I’m prepared to kill someone,” I said.

“Haw! You never know, with these assholes.” He waved vaguely at the other guys on the range. “You brought your own muffs, though.”

I had on a pair of big Mickey Mouse–style ear protectors. At the gate a small brown man with “Rangemaster” embroidered on his shirt pocket had offered them to me. Not stylish, but I do value my hearing.

“Loaners.”

“Good enough. Look, we’ll find you something. I want to get another hundred rounds in.”

So we stood out in the sun, tapping away. Ganderson let me use a customized Model 1911—someone had done a nice job with the barrel and action, but the laser sight was so embarrassing I had to double-check that I didn’t recognize anyone else on the range.

“We’ve got a problem,” Ganderson said, during a reload.

“Yes?”

“It’s complicated.”

Of course.

I’d looked up Ganderson online before driving out here. He was yet another investment banker. Managing director at Aldershot Capital Partners, a boutique M&A firm. Nothing exceptional, and
nothing in recent news suggested he was dealmaking in choppy waters. But I noticed that his name collected more hits than one might expect—far more, given the modest size of his company. Advisory committees. Business roundtable position papers. Congressional testimony. Ganderson seemed to have an informal role as industry grandee.

“A number of us in the financial services industry, we’re concerned,” he said. “The public, the way they think about bankers and investors—not to put too fine a point on it, they seem to hate us.”

“No, really?”

Ganderson grinned. “They hate our business, even though they don’t understand any of it.” He pulled a new magazine from a ballistic carryall on the ground, checked the load and racked it into his MP5. “They hate our companies. Our partners.” He swung the weapon up and sighted down the range. “Our acquisitions. Our investments. Our families. Our boats. Our
dogs
.”

BRRRAAAAAPPPP.
He fired a long burst, obliterating the paper target, and turned back to face me.

I looked at Ganderson’s face, cheerful under his SWAT cap. He may have thought the world was full of class enemies, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Loose brass littered the ground at his feet. He wore leather shooting gloves, and I noticed he still hadn’t brought his finger outside the submachine gun’s trigger guard.

Careless.

“They hate us, our money, and everything they think we stand for,” Ganderson said. “It’s become something of an identity issue.”

“No argument. But—and I hate to say this—there’s not much I can do about it.”

“Of course not.” He shrugged. “Who cares? Comes with the territory. It’s mostly just talk.”

“Right.”

Ganderson peered at me through his high-impact lenses. “Except when it’s not.”

“Oh?”

“Someone’s gone beyond talk,” he said. “Starting last month. You
know
what I’m referring to.”

“Ah,…the president’s blue-ribbon commission on banking regulation?”

“What?” He looked puzzled.

“I have to say, you want to start kneecapping senators, I might not be the best—”

“Haw!” Ganderson laughed again and waved his MP5. “No, no. No need for that. Why bother? We just bundle a few hundred grand every election cycle and they’re our friends forever. No, I’m talking about the other assholes.”

“Um…?”

“The ones who’ve started killing us.” Ganderson’s voice deepened. “Jeremy Akelman. Betsy Sills. And Tom Marlett.”

“Oh.”

I finally realized what planet Ganderson’s rover was on.

“Akelman was a hit-and-run,” I said slowly. “Late-night training jog—he was a triathlete, something like that? No reflective vest, on a dark road in Greenwich. The cops figured it for a bad accident.”

“That’s what they said on TV. But they never caught anyone.”

“Sills was that mutual fund manager. Freeboard Investments. She fell off a yacht charter in Jamaica.”

“You do follow the news. Good.”

“And Marlett, last night.” I ejected the pistol’s magazine, locked the slide and set it down on the carryall. Maybe Ganderson would take a hint and disarm himself, too. “Okay, three funerals, all in the last month. But two of them were accidents. How many people work in finance, just in the New York area? A million? On statistics alone, this is nothing unusual.”

“You need the background.” Ganderson left his MP5 in a firing grip.

“Um, okay.”

“Freeboard has something like two hundred mutual funds. When they published last year’s results, Sills was at the bottom.”

“Ah…”

“Of the rankings. One hundred and ninety-nine managers had better results than she did.”

“That bad?”

“The absolute rock bottom. Her one-year return was negative seventy.”

I made a brief quiet whistle. “Okay, I’m impressed.” And I was. Any piker can inflate their 12(b)-1 fees, but it takes real effort to burn off two-thirds of your capital.

“Akelman didn’t do any better.” Ganderson said. “He was a specialized commodities trader. OTC markets, third world mining—you can imagine. The last few months weren’t kind to him.”

“Rare earths.” I remembered now. “He went all in on neodymium and the Chinese flattened him. His firm was one step ahead of receivership when he died.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m sure the lawyers involved are doing all right for themselves.”

“And the Chinese.” Ganderson glanced downrange, at our neighbor’s target, then back to me. “As for Marlett—last quarter his hedge fund lost seventy-eight percent of its assets.”

Same as Johnny had told me. “Got it. Three really lousy money managers.” I paused. “You don’t think they died in accidents, do you?”

“It’s an impossible coincidence.”

“The bottom-ranked mutual fund. The worst hedge fund return I know of, for three years at least. And the biggest commodity loss since Brian Hunter blew up Amaranth.” I almost smiled. “I’m seeing a pattern here.”

“Kind of jumps out at you, doesn’t it?”

“No one else has figured it out yet?”

“We’ve had some calls.” Ganderson finally took his trigger hand out of ready. “So far we’re dealing with it.”

I bet. “So who’s up next, do you think?” I said. “You must be running a pool—can I get in?”

“Don’t be a jackass.” He cleared the submachine gun’s action, hands moving with the automatic familiarity of long practice. “Marlett was a friend of mine.”

I considered that for a moment. “No, he wasn’t.”

For a moment it could have gone either way.

“How would you know?” Ganderson said.

“Your friend is killed by gunfire, and a few hours later you’re here, plinking away? Even for”—I hesitated—“ah, our line of business, that’s cold. I don’t think so.”

“Well, I met him once.”

Which actually could count for friendship in this world. “Whatever. So we’re looking at…a more rigorous implementation of performance-based incentivization, maybe?”

“What?”

“Cash bonus is all good on the upside, but if you fuck up on the downside, Machete comes to call? I have to say, I like it.”

“And the idea has certainly been floated, more than once.” He might have been kidding. “But that’s not what’s going on. Not that anyone knows about. Anyway, it’s against the code of ethics.”

Really?
Section 4: You may not kill staff for bad performance.
This time I didn’t bother trying not to smile. “Right. So…what do you want me to do about it?”

“Go find the murderer, of course.”

I thought about it. “Losing so much money—lots of suspects out there, don’t you think?”

“Not necessarily. Disgruntled investors usually don’t pick up a MAC-10.” Neither does anyone else with an ounce of sense, of course, but the firearms training at Willow Haven probably wasn’t up to Fort Benning standards. “Still, as I said, everyone hates the bankers. Like it’s all
our
fault somehow.”

“It isn’t?”

“If you have money in an underperforming investment, it doesn’t
do any good shooting the manager—everyone loses everything that way.”

“So maybe it’s just some little guy who finally couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Exactly.” Ganderson finally set down the MP5 and pulled off his cap and shooting glasses. “Everyone’s retirement depends on the stock market. Social Security’s a goner and big companies are bailing out of their pensions right and left. On top of that, market data is everywhere—you can’t escape. It wouldn’t take much to push some unstable personality over the edge.”

If an underfunded 401(k) were my only hope of not spending my golden years running a Burger King register, I might be pissed too, but I didn’t interrupt. Ganderson seemed to have been practicing for interviews.

“Shooting a few investment managers with bad records is populist theater of a very high order,” he said. “A hundred years ago anarchists threw bombs at robber barons. Today they might be looking for other scapegoats. They might be coming after us!” Obviously not meaning me, but I let it go. “I fear—” Ganderson’s voice dropped. “I fear we may be seeing the beginning of our own Red Terror!”

“Wait a minute.” I tried to follow the logic. “Terrorists, okay, sure. But why would they kill your guys?—who, let’s face it, were doing a pretty good job undermining trust in the capitalist system all on their own.”

“Oh, come on.” He frowned. “If you’re a madman with a gun, you don’t have to make sense.”

I guess I could go with that.

“That’s how it’ll probably play, anyhow,” Ganderson said, and suddenly his voice was back to normal.

“Okay.” I nodded. “So you’re looking for some kind of Munich operation. Hunt them down, demonstrate the rule of law.”

“Not exactly. We don’t care about the rule of law.”

Now
there
was a refreshingly honest statement. “Can I quote you on—”

He cut me off with a laugh. “Forget it. What we want is—we just need this to
stop.
”

“Can’t the police handle it? Or call the FBI. I’m sure there are interstate angles they can use to assert jurisdiction. Once they think this is some kind of direct-action Marxist conspiracy, they’ll field a hundred agents. Wat Tyler won’t stand a chance.”

“Wat—?”

“Never mind. Look, I don’t understand. What do you need me for?”

Ganderson rubbed his eyes. Someone probably woke him up in the middle of the night when the Marlett news broke.

“We can’t let this turn into a circus. If the public gets the wrong storyline…”

“Does it matter?”

Some paper scraps from an ammunition box had escaped the Willow Haven grounds crew and were blowing across the manicured grass of the range. The rangemaster announced on a loudspeaker that they’d be moving the line to seventy-five yards, and the firing from the other lanes petered out as other shooters stopped for the break.

“You probably don’t believe me,” said Ganderson, “but it’s not
just the bad publicity I’m thinking about. Like I said, populist rage is too easy to stir up. What we want to avoid at all costs—besides this lunatic continuing his spree—is a proliferation of copy-cats.”

“Ah.”

“A wildfire, whipped up by demagogues.”

“Now you’re making sense,” I said, and he was. Finally. “Open season on bankers. Talk about negative optics.”

“Exactly.”

“Can I ask you something? Is that the reason for all this?” I gestured at the range, the other shooters, the guns at Ganderson’s feet. “Finance isn’t usually where you find a lot of Second Amendment enthusiasm.”

“Some of us have been serious for years.” Ganderson glanced sourly at a young man two lanes away, holding his Beretta 92 in a sideways grip like some idiot video gangster, half his shots missing the target entirely. “But yes, ever since the economy went south, personal protection has been a concern.”

Not that Wall Street had anything to
do
with the economy going south, of course. “So everyone’s strapped now? You go into a meeting, sit around the conference table and chitchat about handloading and trigger pull before getting down to business?”

“Sometimes. Can we get back to the point?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “You want me to find your killer. I can do that.”

“Good.” Ganderson began casing his guns, tossing the cartridge boxes into a duffel.

“Or them. Or her, for that matter.”

“Let’s hope there’s only one.”

We negotiated a reasonable fee on the way back to the clubhouse, figured out logistics, traded direct cellphone numbers. Ganderson headed for the front doors.

“You’re not going to get in some golf?” I asked. “Air out the gunsmoke?”

“I have to run my son up to Highfield.” He sighed and glanced down the veranda. The unhappy boy I’d noticed earlier was still in the rocker, head tipped back now, eyes closed. “He’s working on a farm.”

“Oh.”

“A
goat
farm.”

“College applications coming up?”

“Yes, but this is hardly going to help.” Ganderson hefted his weaponry bags. “I told him I’d send him to volunteer anywhere in the world. And not just the rat holes! He wouldn’t have to dig latrines in Haiti; he could sit on a beach in the South Pacific and teach the natives how to make piña coladas. But no—he wants to shovel goat shit a half hour from home.”

“Well, I hope they’re angoras.”

“He brings home milk. I had to tell the cook to throw it away when he isn’t looking.” Ganderson shook his head. “And he’s only managed a probationary license, so we still have to drive him everywhere. I swear, I don’t remember giving my father so much grief when I was his age.”

“Go bond,” I said. “I’ll take care of the Wall Street avenger.”