Authors: Sam Waite

Tags: #forex, #France, #Hard-Boiled, #Murder, #Mystery, #Paris, #Private Investigators

Dollar Down (25 page)

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"I shot your big friend four times," she said.

A noticeable tremble ran through Wu's body.

"She did," I said.

Marie marched Wu away from the door and ordered
him not to turn around. Gatineau just stood like a dismayed
schoolboy. For all his power, violence was not his element. It
was mine and I hated to use it against Alexandra. She left little
choice. I wrenched her arms from around my neck and shoved
her to the floor. Then I shot the computer. Marie and I went out
and closed the door behind us. We hadn't gone far before the
door started to open.

I fired the shotgun. It's a fearsome weapon.

The door closed quickly. I handed the gun to Marie.
There was one shell left.

"If the door opens again, shoot, but don't hit
anyone."

She nodded.

I found Tom Hall's number on Gatineau's phone and
called him. He assumed it was the Winchell boss.

"What's happening? We still have time to make a
trade." He quickly said something in code that I didn't
understand. Not that it mattered.

I let the seconds tick by.

"Gatineau?"

"Incorrect, Tom. No time left at all."

Chapter 35

Gatineau was wrong. I didn't spend the rest of my life
in a French lockup. I was in one for only a couple of months. I
was a suspect in manslaughter, a flight risk, a material witness.
Pascal was no help at all in my defense. In fact, he didn't even
want to admit he knew me.

The guy who proved to be my patron was Bizet. He had
earned a bushel off my shenanigans. As he had promised, ten
percent was mine, but still he covered my legal fees out of his
share. Burroughs had also done well from his investment. It
wasn't billions, but from the two of them, I came out with a
large multiple of a six-figure pay day. That wasn't bad, even
after I paid off my team.

As for Oddsson, Sabine hadn't told him about the
Orimulsion study, but he spied on her regularly as a matter of
course. When he learned of China's failure to develop a cheap
liquefaction process, he thought up the plan to dupe OPEC and
make an unprecedented fortune by shorting the dollar in the
forex market.

He had dealt with Wu's father in the past. Father Wu
had been the go-to man for official approval of a China
business venture that Oddsson had worked on. There were a
lot of regulations involved, but the only documents that had
really been necessary were U.S. bank notes passed under the
table.

Wu was Oddsson's kind of man.

Father Wu had seen beyond the larceny to a
geopolitical checkmate. He told China's generals about the plan
and sent his son to Paris on a student visa. With Wu's support,
the generals were able to strengthen their political position.
Besides the build-up of military force and provocations in the
Taiwan Strait, they sent nuclear submarines into Japan's
territorial waters to test that nation's ability to track their
undersea vessels. They also probed Guam and American Samoa
and nosed around Midway, perhaps to get a taste of what it
would feel like when their Green Water ambitions were
realized.

The dollar had not collapsed, so Taiwan and the rest of
East Asia was not exactly theirs for the taking. At least not now,
but that goal had become much closer.

The irony was that Wu had lost a bundle of state
money, but he had still come out a hero. Even though the dollar
had quickly recovered about fifty percent of its two-day loss, it
was a huge setback for America.

Venezuelan President Maduro did not come out so well.
That country did not have five hundred billion in foreign
exchange to play with. His high-stakes dalliance had
bankrupted the state.

He was arrested before he could flee the country. In an
abbreviated judicial process, he was impeached, convicted and
imprisoned. Gavizon was proud of his role in that outcome. I
asked him to let U.S. lawmen talk to his niece to see if they
could get evidence that the sulfur-eating bacteria didn't do
their job in the field.

He said okay. The lawmen got what they needed. Saudi
Arabia was relieved at the news. The reins of the oil market
were back in its hands, but that didn't restore the dollar to its
global currency status. OPEC had decided to set prices based
on a basket of currencies—an average of the dollar, euro and
yen at a three-two-one ratio.

That would still hurt the American consumer, but not
as much. They would have to buy only half of their oil imports
in foreign currency. That outcome might have been for the best.
Technologies that contributed to fuel conservation were
suddenly getting a lot of political backing.

About our man at LIFFE. As soon as he figured the ruse,
Tom Hall collected his personal savings and slipped out of
England. He made it to Argentina. As far as the Argentines were
concerned, he could stay. Anyone who helped discredit the
British financial system was okay by them. After all these years,
the Falkland war still rankled.

In France, criminal authorities were keeping Alexandra,
as well as Oddsson and Gatineau, safe from retaliation by angry
investors. At least until they left prison.

I was free to go. In fact, I was encouraged to go. The
French police did not ride me out of town on a rail, but they did
suggest that if I were to visit Europe again I might enjoy Spain
or Italy more than France. Lots of sun. Good food. I thanked
them for the recommendations, found a cab and checked into a
five star hotel.

I called Marie. She agreed to show me the other side of
Paris, the side that had earned the appellation "The City of
Light." While playing tourist, it occurred to me that in
mid-winter, Paris was a lot like Alexandra—cold, hard and achingly
beautiful.

I waited until my last day in France before I gave Marie
the envelope that I had been keeping for her. We'd found a
path to a narrow bank on the Seine and sat close to the river.
The sun was low and it flecked silver highlights across the
water. Marie tried to be cool as she broke the seal on the
envelope, but there was an aura of anticipation. I think she
knew what was inside. She just didn't know how much.

When she looked, she said something that sounded like
an eagle screaming down the Grand Canyon. I had paid Gavizon,
McNulty and Pascal their standard rates plus a bonus. What
was left, I split down the middle with the young woman who
had saved my life. It was a lot. Marie lunged at my neck and
squeezed tight enough to hurt.

"Come on, Mick. I'll buy you a bottle of the best
champagne in France." She grabbed my sleeve and tugged.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Her eyes and grin were wide, but she couldn't answer.
I started to tell her to get away from Pascal, spend the money
on an education, get a new career, but who was I to know what
she wanted.

"You go ahead Marie. I'd like to just sit here for a
while."

She gave the invitation another try. When I said, "No
thanks," she made a disappointed face, but it didn't look
genuine. She didn't skip as she left, but she came close.

A tour boat pulled into a dock not far from where I sat.
I spent a few minutes daydreaming about stealing it and
floating downriver, just to see where it took me. But then I
figured that the trip would be boring. It would have been too
much like my real life, which has never been blessed with
planning.

Once I started putting things together after Sabine died,
there was a matter that nagged me so badly it obscured things
that I should have seen. The question was, after I helped clear
Oddsson of Sabine's murder, why hadn't he sent me
packing?

I would never know the real answer, but my best guess
is that he saw me as an unknown quantity and therefore a
potential danger. He couldn't be sure of what I knew or what I
would do. He might have considered it safer to keep me in tow.
Put me in his debt. Seduce me with his charm. If that wasn't
enough, then with Alexandra's charm.

Maybe he simply saw me as a rube, whose presence
made things more amusing. If I got out of hand, there was
always Cervantes to take care of things. Perhaps that's what he
had in mind all along. He was waiting for the right
circumstance to get back at one of Sabine's lovers, who had
insulted his ego.

I would grieve for Sabine a long time, less for what she
had meant to me personally than for who she was. I'd never
met anyone who embraced life so intensely.

I looked up river at a bridge adorned with grand
statues, burnished by the sun. One was of a staunch young
man.

He didn't have a halo, but he did have angel wings and
a sword, and in his eye, a glint of vengeance.

Afterword

Tip of the hat to Bloomberg's Liam Vaughan and
Gavin Finch for their work on
The Bandit's Club: The Inside
Story of How Banks Manipulated Libor and Foreign
Exchange
. (November 2015)

In November 2014, regulators in the United States,
Britain and Switzerland fined some of the world's largest
banks a combined $4.24 billion for rigging the currency
market.

China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan has
long advocated a global currency to replace the dollar.

In 1965, Charles de Gaulle said, "Americans (can)
get into debt...for free at the expense of other countries." In the
same decade, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, coined the
phrase "exorbitant privilege" to describe the role of the dollar
as the global reserve currency. In 1971, France led a run on
gold that forced Nixon to abandon the Bretton Woods
accord.

America's trade deficit with Japan has no more
significance than the deficit of one U.S. state with another.
(Paraphrase from author's interview with then McKinsey
managing director Ohmae Kenichi in 1991)

China's military budget increased by roughly 10
percent for 2015, largely for high-tech submarines and stealth
aircraft. (BBC News)

About the Author

Sam Waite worked more than twenty-five years in Japan,
including stocks editor at Bloomberg and communications specialist
at McKinsey & Co. Before moving to Asia, he was editor in chief
of a daily newspaper in Texas. As a Marine in the 1960's, he served
one year each in Vietnam and Japan, where he began studying
Japanese language. He went on to study Mandarin at Taiwan Normal
University. While he was there, Kissinger visited Beijing, in July,
1971. It was traumatic for Taiwanese who feared they had been
abandoned. On August 9 of that year Sam arrived in Tokyo on his
way home. It was the day Nixon announced the U.S. would no longer
guarantee the sale of gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce. Banks shut
down currency trading, because no one knew what a dollar was
worth vis a vis gold. No bank would exchange his dollars for yen. He
had a plane ticket to the U.S., but needed yen to buy a monorail ticket
to the airport. With only minutes to spare to get the last run that
would let him catch his plane, a train station employee gave him
from his own pocket enough yen coins to buy a ticket. Thus began
the end of the Bretton Woods accord that had fixed currency
exchange rates since 1945 and the start of his fascination with the
global foreign exchange market.