Reckless (6 page)

“That’s Jason.” Merrill laughed. “That kind of inquisitiveness we could certainly do without. Probably hoping to say hello to a few of his school chums. I hope you cured him.”

“I did my best,” Hauck said. “But as I recall, you raised a pretty determined guy.”

Merrill’s tea came. She took it and thanked Brooke. She took a sip and seemed to feel more at ease.

“So, Ty,” Tom Foley started in, arms on his knees, “you’re probably wondering just why Merrill’s here. I’ll let her tell you, but suffice it to say it’s a very private matter, one that could easily find its way into the local papers, and I assured her we’d handle it with complete discretion.”

“Of course. Goes without saying,” Hauck assured her. “That’s why we’re here.”

Merrill nodded, gearing herself up. She opened her large crocodile-leather bag and took out a manila envelope. “For the past year, I’ve been seeing someone…,” she began to explain. She removed a black and white photo and laid it, tentatively, on the table.

Hauck picked it up.

It was of a man of about thirty-five or forty. Handsome. Dark, European features. A rugged chin. Short, wiry, dark hair. “His name is Dieter Thibault. He goes by Dani. He’s Dutch. His mother was Belgian, I think. At least that’s what he’s led me to believe. Things have moved along quite quickly. I suppose you could say we’ve fallen in love.”

Hauck waited while she took another sip of tea and faced her, putting down the photo. “Go ahead.”

“This is a little difficult for me…,” Merrill said, glancing at Foley.

He nodded her on.

“You’re doing a bit of due diligence, perhaps? In case things get on to the next level,” Hauck inferred.

Merrill gave him a slight nod. “I should stress that Dani is quite successful in his own right. He’s built hotels, done some Internet deals in Eastern Europe. Some members of the Belgian royal family are investors with him. Photos of him with them are very prominent in his office in New York. He’s never needed my money. In fact, it’s his lifestyle I’ve sort of fallen into. It’s just that…”

Hauck waited for a moment while Merrill moistened her lips. She seemed to hesitate.

“It’s just that what, Ms. Simons?”

“It’s just that some of these things…I’ve had my people looking into them. Informally, of course. Some of the transactions he’s made, his personal background…family, university degrees. Sources of income. I’m not exactly sure how to say this. But all of a sudden, I’m not sure they’re adding up.”

“Adding up?” The unease was etched deeply into Merrill Simons’s face. Hauck moved closer.

“It’s as if anything that goes more than a few years back is a complete blank.” Merrill looked up and faced him. “I’m not sure Dani is who he says he is, Mr. Hauck. And before this gets deeper, I want to know who the man I’m supposed to be falling in love with really is.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

R
oger Cantwell stared at his Bloomberg screen in dismay.

High above Park Avenue, on the forty-eighth floor of the sleek glass tower that bore his company’s iconic name, the managing director of Wertheimer Grant read the banner headline flashing across CNBC: MURDERED TRADER WAS WERTHEIMER’S INVESTMENT STAR.

His stomach knotted. He took a breath the way his personal trainer had instructed him to do to ramp down the stress. But no simple cleansing breath could wash this mess away.

It was awful.

The days since Marc Glassman’s murder had thrown the once-shining firm into a maelstrom.
A frigging roach motel of rumor and distortion,
Cantwell thought with dread. He himself had gone through a mix of emotions and worries he had never experienced before. First, the shock. The disbelief, imagining the horror of it. Cantwell had known the trader well. Though it was his rule to leave the investment responsibilities to his senior staff, as head of the firm, and as someone who had never lost his love for the trenches, he’d been in dozens of strategy sessions with Glassman over the years, not to mention sales conferences, golf outings, charitable events.
My God,
Cantwell thought,
we were all together just a few days ago at the firm’s winter opera event at the Met.

But soon the grief started to morph into worry. CNBC’s headline was correct. Marc
was
Wertheimer’s brightest shining star. In the midst of this year from hell—with the mortgage crisis eviscerating the firm’s balance sheet, their earnings dropping like a weight, their stock price tanking in the midst of the global sell-off, rumors flying—Glassman was one of the rare people actually making money for the firm. Some might even say the only thing propping it up.

Now that was gone.

Now there were just these headlines.

Cantwell turned around and gazed gloomily out his office window. He could see the skyline of lower Manhattan to the south, the East River. To the west, the skating pond in Central Park. He liked this view. He wanted to keep it for a while. He wanted to keep the company jet too.

Along with sponsoring Phil Mickelson and hobnobbing with world movers and shakers at places like Davos and the Aspen Institute, not to mention the appearances on Fox and CNBC, where attractive reporters sought out whatever he said.

He just didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep any of it.

The board was growing weary. The firm had a ton of toxic mortgage exposure. Christ, they’d been packaging that shit all the way up, right from the start. Now no one knew what anything out there was worth. “Mark to market,” it would kill them! Not to mention the stock price. Some big-name hedge fund asshole was out there shorting the shit out of it. The market cap had already plummeted from one hundred and ten billion down to fourteen. Not to mention their dwindling cash reserves. And their overnight borrowing on the repo market drying up, all these whispers…If the true picture ever got out, if there was ever a run on the accounts—Cantwell swallowed—they’d be toast.

He looked at the wall of photographs of him with leaders and celebrities that had been taken over the years. Yes, he’d been paid millions over that span. Yes, he had the cushy duplex on the park and the compound at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, not to mention the place on the beach in East Hampton. But most of what he had was still tied up in company stock. And he’d been buying it all the way down. He had to show faith, didn’t he? Now, having borrowed against a substantial part of it, he had to wait it out. At their current value, his holdings were only worth maybe double what he owed.

And now Marc.
Cantwell turned away from the screen. He had barely been able to sleep the past two nights. There was pressure from everywhere. The board. The investor community. Even the Fed. Now the fucking press…People were saying they might have to merge. Cantwell responded with defiance.
Wertheimer Grant doesn’t merge.
The firm had been around for ninety-five years. It was an American icon. Wertheimer Grant
acquires
firms. Maybe it stumbles; maybe it loses its way for a while. But it doesn’t fall.

Wertheimer Grant is Wall Street.

Cantwell’s stomach tightened as he watched the stock tick down to a new yearly low. Eight and a quarter. Just two months ago it had been fifty! “Murder of prominent trader creates market unrest…Redemptions reportedly high. Wall Street speculating on whether the firm can remain independent…”

They didn’t need this kind of exposure now.

“Mr. Cantwell…”
His secretary Mary’s voice buzzed in.
“Mr. Biondi and Ms. Pearlstein are here to see you.”

“Sure, yes,” Cantwell answered. He got up and turned away from the screen. “Send them in.”

Stan Biondi was his senior investment manager who oversaw all trading at the firm. He was Marc Glassman’s senior boss. Brenda Pearlstein was their corporate counsel in charge of compliance issues. They’d buzzed him a while ago to see if they could come on up. What the devil could the two of them be up to?

“We have to stem this fallout over Marc,” Cantwell said, stepping over to the conference table as they came in.

Biondi shut the door behind them. He and Brenda came over to the table. Biondi’s face looked like the Dow had just nose-dived eight hundred points. “Roger, we need to talk.”

Brenda, always tough to read, wasn’t providing any more cheer.

“Here, sit down.” Cantwell pulled out a chair. But as he did, Biondi pointed to his desk. “No, over at the screen.”

The head of trading went around Cantwell’s large architect’s desk. He bent over his monitor and punched in a request. At the prompt, he added his security code.

Cantwell tried to read their faces. “What’s going on, guys?”

“It’s about Marc.”

“I know. A complete nightmare.” Cantwell sighed. “I don’t know how we’re ever going to replace…” He was about to say
him,
but, in fact, what Cantwell knew he meant was the trader’s
earnings
.

“Roger,” Biondi said, “I don’t give a shit about replacing him. Come around.”

An unsettling feeling rose up in Cantwell’s gut as his manager steered the computer screen around. Several columns appeared on the screen. Cantwell immediately saw it was Marc Glassman’s trading positions. They would be current as of today, and Cantwell saw many of the numbers were highlighted in green, representing profits.

He exhaled. “We’re actually lucky to have all that now, Stan, considering…”

“Considering
what
?” Biondi clicked to the summary page, known as the Recap. It listed the cost and current value of all of Glassman’s positions.
“Look,”
he said to Cantwell, and fixed his eyes on him, his face ashen.

He ran the cursor to “Total Outstanding Position.” It showed Glassman had open positions of $4.9 billion. Cantwell looked at his head of trading, puzzled. That couldn’t be right. No individual had that kind of limit. The firm’s exposure could be fatal. Even a senior trader like Marc had maybe three, three and a half as his max.

“What’s going on here, Stan?”

“Okay, Roger,
l-look…”
Biondi always spoke in a rapid cadence, but now he was almost stammering. “I admit, I may have let some of this go on…We needed earnings. You know that. Marc always delivered. I realize how this looks. It didn’t all happen in one swing. It was gradual, over time. I know I’m on the line here…”

“Let
what
happen, Stan?” Cantwell went to advance the screen. “The guy’s more than a billion dollars overdrawn. What kind of effing controls do we have here, anyway?”

Sheet-white, Biondi grabbed his arm. “Roger, there’s more.”

Cantwell looked up, his eyes no longer just on Stan but on Brenda as well, the compliance lawyer, wondering what she was doing here, a deepening worry building in his chest.
“How much more?
”

Biondi wet his lips. He typed in another account on the screen. A second ledger of stocks and open positions came up.

Glassman’s.

Another trading account.

Roger Cantwell’s eyes stretched wide. The dread in his chest wormed straight to his bowels. “Stan, tell me what the hell is going on here,
now…
”

This new account held over $3.7 billion. That made over eight total. “It’s out of the Singapore office,” the head of trading said. “Roger, I don’t even know how this got set up. I know I once signed some letter of authorization that he could trade the Pac markets out of there…But a lot of this is just murky. Papered over. I still don’t understand—he’s been shifting funds between accounts, all over the globe, covering his trades…”

Now a tremor of panic ran through Cantwell. This was all they needed. He put his fingers to his temples. “Are there more?”

Sweat had come out on Biondi’s brow and he hesitated, glancing at Brenda.

“Don’t screw with me, Stan!” Cantwell’s glare bore right through him.
“Are there more?”

“One,”
Biondi said, swallowing. He brought up a last screen.

The Recap read $2.8 billion.
Two-point-eight billion.
Dizzily, Cantwell started doing the math, but Brenda Pearlstein beat him to it. “It’s over eleven billion dollars, Roger.”

Eleven billion dollars
. Cantwell felt his legs buckle. He sank back down. Biondi could be fired for this.

He
could be fired.

“How long has this been going on?”

“A while.” Biondi fell into the leather chair across from him. “Look, you know the numbers, Roger. We needed earnings. Marc’s always been driving them. I just let it go on. But, Roger, listen, there’s—”

Cantwell leaned forward and clicked back to the three Recap pages again. Most of the positions were in green. Gains. Each account showed Glassman well ahead. Up almost 7 percent. Close to eight hundred million.
Thank God.
An exhalation of relief poured out of him.

“At least the little prick knew what the hell he was doing.” Cantwell blew out his cheeks, feeling a second wind, sitting back down. The bastard had done it again!
This might actually help them.

“Tell him,” Brenda said, her eyes trained on Biondi.

The head of trading nodded, gulping.

“Tell him,”
Brenda said again, “or I will.”

“Tell me what?” The iciness of her expression didn’t suggest she was buying Cantwell’s image of a happy ending. “Tell me fucking
what,
Stan,” he turned back to Biondi, “before I throw you off the forty-eighth floor!”

“It’s a disaster,” the trading manager said, spitting it all out. “Worse than a disaster, Roger. All these gains…” He pointed to the screen, the columns of green. “
Here,
and here…They’re merely paper trades. Made up. To cover his losses. They never took place, Roger.” Biondi’s face was white. “They’re all completely false.”

“False…”

Cantwell’s jaws parted as he stared at the screen, the full enormity of what Biondi was telling him slowly, impossibly, settling in. Their reserves were already shredded. The market would drop six hundred points tomorrow on the news. Their stock would open up at two.