Death of a Pharaoh (11 page)

 "What about
Mustafa?"

"He will meet
me at the airport in Cairo when I arrive from Switzerland. He will arrange the
transportation of the body to the new Royal Crypt and will begin to prepare the
ceremonies so that the Pharaoh may begin her journey to meet Osiris."

"Thank you my
friend. Our Pharaoh could not be in better hands."

At that moment, a
customs officer arrived to inspect the documentation as the pilot had just
filed the new flight plan with a departure scheduled within the hour.

"Officer, I
am the Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the cargo of this aircraft
is traveling under diplomatic pouch as will attest this document signed by your
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. All passengers hold
diplomatic passports. Thank you for your time but your services will not be
required. My counselor assistant will accompany you into the office to provide
a copy of the documentation."

Once the officer
left, the Ambassador turned and embraced the Chief kissing him on both cheeks.
"May the Gods protect you Lord Vizier and long live the True
Pharaoh."

"May Horus
watch over your precious cargo!” he pleaded then added, “I will see you in
Cairo."

Professor Sonkin’s residence, downtown
Pittsburgh: 10:59 EDT September 13, 2016

Dmitri Sonkin stuck out his tongue at the pitiful reflection staring
back at him from the bathroom mirror in the well-appointed master bathroom of
his upscale condominium. It was coated. He felt like shit and the fact that he
had barely slept in the past four days only added to his misery. It was 11.00
am but he was still in his dressing gown; unshaved and unkempt.

He hadn’t been
back to his office since he’d ordered the mugging of a little old lady,
someone’s great aunt for all he knew, and a black woman to boot. It was one of
the more despicable acts of his miserable existence; not that his life had been
without its share of dastardly deeds. He was certainly no saint but asking a
thug to beat up a defenseless senior citizen was a new low, even by his own
down-in-the-gutter standards. Still, she had left him no choice. She was
ruining the plan and had to be stopped. Part of his anxiety, he knew, was
because he actually liked her even if they had never met face-to-face. After
all, she unwittingly saved his bacon twelve years ago when he’d stumbled upon
her existence just when dozens of irate clients threatened to take him to
court. It was not a pleasant memory.

As a Professor of
Applied Mathematics at Mellon Carnegie University, he had spent most of his
career researching predictability in complex systems. He adored order; even
chaos had a pattern. He didn’t believe in luck, leprechauns in your pocket or
divine intervention. He was a scientist for Christ’s sake, a committed atheist.
As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t anything you couldn’t express in a
mathematical formula.

A year before she
appeared, he had risked his reputation, his account at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center and millions of dollars of his clients’ money to try and
develop a sophisticated model to predict trends in commodity prices and the
stock market. Colleagues around the world warned him that
it was impossible to capture the full detail of the
underlying system even with the aid of the newest generation of supercomputers.
The world's economy was too complicated, a veritable universe of opposing
forces far too sensitive to even the slightest perturbation and therefore
impossible to quantify. There was
just too much data to process.

 Dmitri refused to
listen and felt vindicated when his predictive model seemed to work at first.
Within a year, he had forged a reputation among a growing list of corporate
clients and investment professionals. He started to make money again and then
it all fell apart. The formula didn't work after all. He had merely hit a run
of luck. It was pure coincidence that his predictions tracked the market. He
ran the simulations repeatedly, like some mad scientist desperate to find the
antidote to the self-inflicted mutations caused by his crazed ambition.

Eventually he was
forced to accept what he knew deep in his heart. He was no more able to predict
trends in the stock market than the man who sold him the newspaper every
morning. At that moment, Dmitri found himself on the edge of professional and
financial ruin. The situation might have even led to criminal charges. On top
of it all, he was in the middle of a bitter divorce with his bitch of a wife
whose sleazy lawyer had recently taken aim at his consulting income.

Soon he was
living in a cheap cockroach infested apartment,
driving a second hand clunker, paying child support for the three brats who
didn’t even want to see him anymore and refusing to take calls from his clients
as their losses mounted. He couldn't sleep, his weight dropped and his blood
pressure was on the verge of popping a vein like one of those plastic
thermometers they put in Thanksgiving turkeys. Fortunately, he had tenure or
the Dean would have fired him as the complaints piled up.

His salvation
jumped out of the data just when everything appeared hopeless. For weeks, he
had been desperately reviewing reports of abnormally high correlations between
the changes in economic cycles and the trading records at major investment
funds and brokers. Berkshire Hathaway appeared high on every list until he stumbled
upon a completely unknown non-profit fund with more than $80 billion under
management and a perfect trading record. It hardly seemed possible and even
more improbable was the fact that if they indeed had a perfect system then why
wasn’t their $80 billion, ten or a hundred times larger? The trustee of the
fund was a prominent African American lawyer in Philadelphia but there was no
information about who decided their investment policy. They scrupulously
avoided positions that required the filing of detailed disclosures with the
Security and Exchanges Commission.

Sonkin contacted a
former teaching assistant who owed him big time. While doing postgraduate
studies, he had been caught hacking into the university’s computer system and
changing students' grades for money. Dmitri vouched for him, saying that he had
actually asked him to test the security of the system. The campus police
exonerated the hacker based on Dmitri’s testimony and found him a good job with
one of his clients. The computer whiz tracked all the trades to the same
internet connection. It had a remarkably sophisticated firewall, especially for
a home account but it proved no match for the hacker. That same afternoon,
Dmitri had the name and address of the registered owner and he immediately hired
a private investigator to find out everything possible about the individual.

Once he started to
get real-time echoes of the subject’s trading activities from his hacker
employee, he distilled the trades into trends and passed them on to his clients
as the product of his flawed mathematical model. Before long, they forgot about
their previous loses as the profits rolled in. His colleagues were still
skeptical especially since he refused to submit his research to peer review; a
posture that essentially burned him in the academic community. He couldn’t have
cared less. He was getting rich. Within eighteen months, he signed more than
2,000 subscribers to his monthly trends report at anywhere from $2,000 to
$5,000 per year. Annual revenues were north of $6,000,000 and climbing. Best of
all, his blood-sucking slut of an ex-wife wouldn’t get a penny.

A year later, he
bought a condo in one of Pittsburgh’s finest buildings and paid cash. He even
had a NFL player as a neighbor. He drove a sleek high-end sports car and was
shopping around for a sailboat. It all seemed too good to be true and that is
when he received his first visit from Jeffrey Stevenson.

He showed up
without an appointment; something that Dmitri despised and his gut reaction was
to tell his secretary that he was busy.

“He insists on
seeing you Professor Sonkin,” his secretary assured him over the intercom, “and
he says that he won’t leave until you agree to talk to him,” she reported with
just a little too much glee in her voice.

Dmitri paused for
a moment wondering how best to gain back control of the situation. He pushed
the button, “Alright, tell him that I’ll see him in five minutes.” That will
teach him. If he walked in unannounced then he could just cool his jets for a
while.

Some dust on the face
of his very expensive Cartier watch occupied most of his attention while he
timed the five minutes to make certain that he didn’t admit his visitor a
second too soon. He had just licked his fingertip in order to remove a
particularly stubborn smudge when the door to his office burst open and in
marched a tall heavyset man wearing an exquisite bespoke suit, followed by his
very flustered secretary mumbling apologies.

“It’s alright
Gertrude. That will be fine, just shut the door and hold my calls,” Dmitri
instructed before turning to address his appointment. “Mr. Stevenson I presume,
please….” he pointed at a chair.

His visitor sat
down and waited, staring directly at Dmitri.

“How can I be of
assistance?” Dmitri asked after a very uncomfortable ten seconds.

“Very kind of you
to make time for me Professor Sonkin, I must apologize for arriving without an
appointment,” he remarked then continued without waiting for an
acknowledgement. “I am an attorney and I represent a group of companies that
have recently formed an association to pursue mutually beneficial goals,” he
announced. “I am certain you understand that the names of these businesses need
to remain confidential but I can tell you that many of them are already
subscribers of your very successful trends newsletter,” he assured Dmitri.

“Well why didn’t
you say so in the first place?” Dmitri interjected.

“Professor Sonkin,
please do not interrupt,” he responded curtly and Dmitri sank back in his chair
like a puppy who had just been scolded for peeing on the carpet.

“My clients,
against my better advice I might add, have asked me to present you with a very
attractive offer of collaboration that will make your current income seem like
mere pocket change,” he boasted.

Dmitri couldn't
help but laugh at the audacity of the statement. “I don’t mean to sound
professorial Mr. Stevenson but I think that you should have done your homework
before bursting in here making outlandish statements,” he scolded his visitor.
“Although my accounts are not a matter of public record, I can assure you that
my current activities are making me a millionaire and….”

Stevenson cut him
off before he could continue. “Professor Sonkin, I have copies of your income
tax returns for the past ten years and I can tell you the current balances in
your checking and savings accounts to the penny,” he spate. “I also know how
much you are paying that big-assed hooker that you have set up in an apartment
so that you can knock her around every week in order to get a hard-on and feel
like a man again after your wife demonstrated who really had the balls in the
family.”

His words impacted
like automatic gunfire and Dmitri’s head spun while he tried to figure out how
this perfect stranger could know so much about his private affairs.

“Now that I have
your undivided attention,” he stated, “please allow me to explain my employer’s
very generous offer.”

Dmitri coughed
nervously. He was certain that Stevenson was used to getting his way in most
situations. “Of course, please continue.”

“The Consortium,
as we shall call it from now on, is grateful for the profits that they have
made as a result of your advice. However, my employers have developed a very
ambitious investment plan over the next few years. It requires..,” he paused a
few seconds searching for the correct term, “…a stable economic situation that
can be guaranteed to last for a minimum of two years without significant
changes in a series of market parameters that I shall outline shortly,” he
smiled at Dmitri as if he had just agreed to sell him a used car.

“If you are able
to guarantee these conditions, we will deposit the sum of $75 million dollars
in an offshore account in your name as well as make twenty-four monthly
payments of $5 million as long as you stay within the agreed parameters.”

Dmitri felt
stunned. He didn’t have to be a mathematician to understand that this guy was
offering him almost two hundred million in just over two years. It was beyond
his wildest dreams. Even with his current income, he could never earn that
amount in a lifetime.

“I’m all ears, Mr.
Stevenson.”

“It is quite
simple Professor Sonkin. What my client wants is chaos, after all that is your
specialty is it not? Chaos?”

Sonkin tried to
hide his annoyance as the attorney repeated the same error that most people
made regarding his area of expertise.

“They want a bear
market that will last a total of eight quarters and a significant enough drop
in global GDP to qualify the period as a recession,” he stated bluntly as if he
had just finished reading his Christmas list.

“That is a tall
order Mr. Stevenson," yet even as he spoke the words, Sonkin knew that he
could deliver with time to spare and he was already thinking of how to spend
some of the money.

That meeting was
fourteen months ago and the payments piled up in the Cayman Islands with
breathtaking regularity. Everything chugged along according to plan; the
Consortium was on track with their goal for global economic domination and
Dmitri's fabulous new sailboat neared completion in Norway.

Sonkin understood
that for the market to change she had to travel to Senegal. He didn’t know why
and didn’t really care. He just knew that if she went to Africa before
schedule, he would be a dead man.

He wondered why
she so drastically deviated from the norm after ten years of remarkable predictability;
until now, there were always at least five years between trips. Based on her
history, he hadn’t anticipated her to return to Senegal for eighteen or twenty
months. Two days ago, she booked a flight to Dakar scheduled to leave in less
than three weeks. It was an unmitigated disaster. He promised the Consortium
that the current market conditions would remain conducive to their business
plan for at least another year. They had invested hundreds of billions and in
the process, making him wealthy beyond all his dreams. Now everything was at
risk.

For a brief
moment, he thought of taking all his money and escaping to some remote island
but he knew that they would find him. The members of the Consortium might well
be highly respected captains of industry with refined country club manners but
if he screwed this up, they wouldn’t hesitate to have him killed. And that is
precisely why they insisted that 80% of his earnings from them be placed in
escrow on the condition that everything would revert back to the Consortium
should he meet an untimely death before completion of his contract.