Hades (30 page)

Togo asked in Chinese what it was he had to do so quickly.

The man answered in Chinese: “The policeman. The one you’ve been watching. He’s getting too close. He knows too many things now.”

“I should wait for Ling,” Togo said.

“There is no time to wait for Ling.” And when Togo didn’t answer, the man said, in English, “You are afraid if you don’t have a girl to protect you?”

Togo said nothing. Over the phone, the only sound that could be heard was the heavy breathing of the two men.

The man said, switching back to Cantonese, “We cannot wait. Soon he’ll be talking to people. He is already talking to too many people. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Togo told the man.

“Then tell it to me, so I know you hear what I’m saying.”

“He will not talk to any more people,” Togo said. “That is what you want.”

“Yes,” the man said. “That is what I want.”

“I must say one thing to you,” Togo said.

“Go ahead,” the man told him.

“Now
you
listen carefully,” Togo said.

“I’m listening.”

And then Togo spoke in English. He wanted to make absolutely certain the man on the other end of the phone understood what he was saying.

“I am not afraid,” Togo said slowly.

“Is that it?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Togo said, still in English. “I am not afraid of anything.”

“Good for you,” the man said, also in English. And then he hung up.

Justin’s cell phone rang as he and his father were approaching Justin’s white with blue trim Victorian house. The meatball heroes had been delicious.

“Yup,” he said into the cell phone.

“We have some movement on Ellis St. John,” Reggie Bokken-heuser said.

“Tell me.”

“He used his bank card to get some cash. Five hundred dollars.”

“Where?”

“Massachusetts. A town on the Mass–New York border. We’ve got someone on it already. Fletcher sent someone down from Boston to check it out.”

“Has the rental car been spotted?”

“No. But now I’ll get APBs out in New England.”

“Good,” he said. “How go the e-mails?”

“Ellis may be the most boring writer who ever lived. But anything you want to know about who’s screwing who at Rockworth, just ask.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I’m pulling anything that seems remotely relevant. A lot of it has to do with specific trades, so I’m not a hundred percent sure what I’m looking at. I’m flagging anything that has to do with any of the companies on our lists. Oh . . . and Jay . . . just for the hell of it, I e-mailed you the article in the paper, the one about the truck that turned over. With the platinum.”

“A particular reason?”

“No. It’s like one of your hunches. It just interests me. Something pops up in one mystery, the same thing pops up in another, I think it’s better to assume it’s not a coincidence. How’s your pal Roger doing?”

“He needed a few hours. I’m just about to find out.”

“Well, you let me know how that goes, okay?”

“I’ll call you later,” he said.

“Later,” she told him.

Roger Mallone looked as if he hadn’t moved since Justin and Jonathan had left two and a half hours ago. He was sitting on the living room couch, papers spread all around him—on the coffee table, on the couch, on the floor. When they walked in the door, he looked as engrossed as if he were reading the most exciting thriller ever written.

“We brought you a sandwich,” Justin said.

Roger looked up, a look of confusion on his face, almost as if he didn’t understand Justin’s words. Then he said, “Oh—oh, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

Justin waved his hand at the stacks of papers. “Is it that good?”

“It’s fascinating,” Roger said.

“Let me just make some coffee,” Justin said, “then you can lay it all on me.”

He went into the kitchen, turned one of his electric stovetop burners on high, boiled water, and made eight cups of strong coffee, filling his plunger-style coffeemaker to the brim. Roger was not normally the most stimulating teacher, so Justin figured he’d need the jolt. When it was ready, he poured the coffee into the thermos he kept by the stove. He yelled in to ask if anyone else wanted some and got two no’s. Happy to have it all to himself, he poured a mugful and took it back into the living room.

“Ready,” he said.

“Okay,” Roger said, and Justin could hear him trying to rein in his excitement. “I can’t say for absolute certain without a lot more studying and possibly even further access to their records, but there’s something very, very strange going on.”

“Is there a simple version?”

“I’ve tried to organize this as simply as possible,” Roger said, “but if it was simple, they wouldn’t be able to pull this off.”

“What is it they’re pulling off?” Jonathan asked.

Roger spoke to Justin now. “The way a hedge fund works is exactly the way the name implies. It’s one large fund and if you put your money in, you’re investing in that fund as a whole entity. The fund is split up so it can invest in as many different stocks and companies and commodities as it wants to. But it’s one fund. That’s key.”

“Okay,” Justin said. “I grasp the meaning of the word ‘fund.’ You going to define ‘hedge,’ too?”

“I am, as a matter of fact. I know you’ve got a business background, but I do remember that that part of your brain is a little, shall we say, rusty?”

“Sure,” Justin agreed. “Let’s say that.”

“So ‘hedge’ is also exactly what it means when attached to a fund. It means that at any time you can hedge your bet. You think a stock is going to tank, you can short it.” Roger beamed. He loved talking about his business and nothing puffed him up quite so much as explaining to other people how that business worked. Justin decided this had to be one of the greatest days of Roger Mallone’s life. He got to snoop through another company’s records
and
he got to explain it all to Justin. “When you short something you’re betting that the price is going to go down. Let’s say you want to short a thousand shares of Company X, which is selling for ten dollars a share. You think it’s going to be selling for half price before too long. So you make a contract that lets you buy it at a later date when it drops to five and sell it back to someone for the ten-dollar price. The beauty of it—and the danger—is that you don’t put up any money. Your broker borrows a thousand shares from someone else’s portfolio. That person usually doesn’t even know they’re being borrowed. The broker just transfers those shares into your portfolio and then automatically sells them back to someone else at ten—and you’ve made your profit.”

“And if it goes up instead of down . . .”

“Same thing, only in reverse. You short at five and it goes up to twenty. You gotta buy all thousand shares at twenty—you’ve lost your bet. I know people who’ve lost tens and tens of millions of dollars sinking money into stocks they
know
will come down. Only they don’t.”

“How does this apply to Ascension?”

“Well, if I’m reading this right, and I’m pretty sure I am, they’re violating all the tenets of hedge fund management.”

Now Jonathan leaned forward. “How so?” he asked.

“Again, I can’t say this with one hundred percent certainty because I don’t have access to all their accounting records, but it looks as if they’re making separate trades for certain companies that are outside the main fund.”

“Trading shares to and from the main fund?” Jonathan asked.

“Exactly.”

“That illegal?” Justin asked.

Roger shrugged. “It’s difficult to say what’s legal or not when it comes to hedge funds. It’s not
honest
. But it’s for the SEC to decide if it’s legal.”

“It’s not something that would make Ascension investors happy, however,” Jonathan said. “It means they can pick and choose who makes money from their fund.”

“And here’s where it gets trickier,” Roger said, tapping one stack of papers. “It looks as if they made some of the trades themselves—just transferring funds back and forth between different investors, in and out from one fund to another. And it looks as if some of the trades were made using an outside broker.”

“Rockworth and Williams,” Justin said.

Roger nodded. “That’s right.”

“Is there more?” Justin asked.

“There’s a lot more. One is that what they’re shorting isn’t consistent at all with a lot of the other trades they’re making.”

“What are they shorting?”

“Platinum,” Roger said.

“Are you sure?!”

“You want to see my MBA?”

“No, of course not, sorry. It’s just . . . go on.”

“Well,” Roger said, “you’re not wrong to be so confused by that. Considering their connections, especially. And their timing is very curious considering what’s going on in the platinum market. And then I have to say, their luck is extraordinarily bad.”

“What about the timing?”

“Well, I don’t think there are too many people shorting platinum heavily these days. Not with what’s happening in China.”

“What’s happening in . . . ?” Justin started to say, then stopped himself. “Cars. Cars are happening, right?”

“Very good,” Roger said. “
Very
good.”

“China’s going into the car business in a big way,” Justin said slowly. He could hear Daniel French saying to him, up at Rockworth and Williams:
The wave of the future. Chinese cars . . . Chinese everything.

“And you can’t go into it in a big way without platinum,” Roger said. “Not if you want to crack the international market.”

“Right,” Justin said quietly. “Platinum for—what the hell is it—platinum for substrates. Substrates for exhaust devices. It’s all about emission controls.”

“You have definitely been paying attention,” Roger said. “I’m extremely impressed.”

“What was the first thing you were questioning, the connections? No, never mind,” Justin said. “I understand that, too. They’re tied to China because of H. R. Harmon.”

“I know that Rockworth does an incredible amount of business with the Chinese. They’re the envy of everyone on the Street because of their connections. They advise them, they trade for them, they’ve got access to business opportunities no one else can ever get close to . . .”

“And I’ll bet they’ve put Chinese money into the Ascension hedge fund. Daddy taking care of his kid.”

“I’d guess that they did. There are a couple of companies on your list that can probably be linked to China. But that’s what doesn’t make sense.”

“What?”

“Again, I can’t say for sure, but I think several of these companies are shells. I haven’t heard of them and I haven’t been able to trace them, which makes me think they’re set up as part of a scam. Why would Ascension or Rockworth want to scam the Chinese government when it’s such a big source of income for them? Or, on the other hand—” He stopped.

“On the other hand what?” Justin asked.

“If they’re not
being
scammed, why would the Chinese government want to be
part
of a scam?”

None of them had an answer. So finally, Justin said, “All right. That’s the timing and the connections. What about the bad luck?”

“Well, the platinum market shot sky-high recently. Because of the shortage.”

“A shortage of platinum? Why would that be?”

“Because of the cargo ship.”

“Roger, you’ve got to be a little more forthcoming. Miraculously enough, I might know about Chinese cars, but I don’t know shit about platinum cargo ships.”

“One of them sank. About three weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“Coming up from South Africa. Off the coast of Sicily, I think.”

“How much of a shortage was there?”

Roger blew out a breath. Meaning: a big shortage. “I don’t remember exactly how much,” he said, “but enough to alter the market. Maybe fifty, sixty million dollars’ worth disappeared. Maybe more.”

“And they can’t recover it?”

“Yeah, they’ll get it back eventually. But it’ll take time. And in the meantime, there’s a serious shortage.”

“And when that happens?”

“Come on, Jay, it’s like everything else. Supply and demand. There’s a short supply, the price goes up. In this case, it went up a lot.”

“Has it come back down?”

“Not yet.”

“This is unbelievable,” Justin said.

“It’s totally believable,” Roger told him. “It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s very believable. Especially when you look at the travel documents you gave me.”

“LaSalle’s and Harmon’s travel destinations?”

“And the other guy from Ascension, whatever his name is. Fenwick.”

“You’ve got something from that that ties in to what you’re talking about?”

“Well, look at where they went.” Roger had that tone that Justin recognized now: the one that couldn’t hide the fact he thought he was talking to an idiot. He patiently listed all the cities and countries that Evan Harmon, Ronald LaSalle, and Hudson Fenwick had visited on business, as if he were talking to a child.

“What about them?” Justin asked.

“It’s where they mine platinum. Every one of ’em. Platinum mines.”

Justin shook his head. “San Francisco? Come on, who the hell mines platinum in San Francisco?”

“Nobody. But you go about two hours up north to the Trinity River . . . platinum. You fly to San Francisco and drive up. You want to see a map?”

“How about Palm Beach?” Justin said, almost frantic now. “Harmon and LaSalle were there together. They’re mining platinum in Palm Beach now?”

“No,” Roger said. “That’s the only one that didn’t make sense, I mean, in the scheme of things. Well, that and Mexico. And, okay, Mexico I can’t connect. But I figured out Palm Beach.”

Justin was incredulous. “What is it?”

“It’s not that they went to Palm Beach. It’s
when
they went there. The third weekend in March.”

Jonathan began nodding his head slowly now.

“What am I missing?” Justin asked.

“No reason you would know this,” his father said. “But the first weekend in March is about the biggest date there is for hedge fund managers.”

“It’s the Rockworth and Williams hedge fund conference,” Roger said. “Every year. Third weekend in March, at the Breakers Hotel.”