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The merest flicker of a smile. “Something hard and abstruse. Involving math and money. Honestly? Two things I don’t know much about. But you have trouble and I do know about trouble.”
I’ll just bet you do, Emma thought. She didn’t know much about him but she did know he’d seen trouble. Hope told her the story in a video conference while Raul was flying down to her. He and another new recruit at Hope and Felicity’s company, ASI, had been Navy SEALs on patrol in Afghanistan, gathering intel and trying to do whatever it was that Special Forces did in war zones. Their commander was badly wounded and they were assigned a new commanding officer who turned out to be batshit crazy. A psychopath who enjoyed shooting civilians. They’d reported him but the psychopath apparently also enjoyed powerful political protection and the two of them were jailed and threatened with a court martial.
Hope said there’d been a fierce uproar because both men were highly decorated officers. In the end, charges were dropped but they were released from military duty with an other-than-honorable discharge. All from reporting a murderer.
Yeah, he knew trouble.
“Okay. Here.” Emma drew her business card from a suitcoat pocket and lay it down on the table. She watched him and didn’t look down. It was an amazing card, on heavy ganpi paper, and in the center was a hologram of her in profile. She nudged it with her finger and her portrait moved its head full-face toward the viewer and smiled.
“Neat trick,” he said.
Yes, it was. Toby had designed it for her. “Do you see what it says under my name?”
“Emma Holland,” he read aloud. “Risk Management Analyst.” He looked back up at her. “Sounds fancy. Not too sure what it means.”
“It means I study money. I study its flows the way a geologist studies a river in its riverbed. The river might meander, and it might go underground and it might overflow, but it follows the laws of physics. Money is the same. It follows the laws of human greed which are knowable. Like geology, economics makes sense. At least in the aggregate and over time. If it doesn’t, something is deeply wrong. Water doesn’t flow uphill.”
“Okay.” He was watching her carefully.
“Some water has been flowing uphill lately.”
“Okay,” he said again.
“I work in the analysis department of a big investment bank, PIB. Pacific Investment Bank. We’re the fourth-largest investment bank in the world. We have forty analysts producing policy studies. We review companies and write reports but we also keep an eye on markets. We have sell-side analysts and buy-side analysts and quantitative analysts, known as quants. I run the quant department together with a colleague, Toby Jackson. I’m foreign markets, he’s domestic markets. We’re the ones with the biggest picture. We’re well remunerated to pay attention to the overall situation and crunch numbers. And, as of a couple of months ago, the overall situation in the money markets has been … well, unstable.” She frowned. “No, not unstable, more like irrational. The market can be skittish and volatile but we are always aware ofwhya market is behaving erratically. Even when the market is wrong, we can understand the reasons why. But recently, the market has been behaving like someone with a psychiatric disorder. We’ve been pulling in data from a lot of different places to see if we can find an explanation. But we can’t.” She stared in frustration at the tabletop, trying to find the words to explain her and Toby’s unease.
“Okay,” Raul said again. “Gotcha. You’re watching the effects of something big and maybe dangerous, but you can’t see the cause yet.”
She lifted her head, met his eyes. He got it. “Exactly. There’s something big going on and Toby and I can feel it and almost taste and smell it but we can’tseeit.
Even though it’s centered in San Francisco.”
Raul’s eyes opened slightly, which in soldier-speak was probably stunning astonishment. “This is a stock market or investment market or whatever you want to call it thing, and it’s centeredhere?” His long forefinger pointed down at their table.
“More like there.” Emma smiled faintly, pointing her thumb to where the Financial District skyscrapers stood tall and proud. “But yes. Our city is responsible for the market going haywire.”
“And other people haven’t noticed?”
“Well, journalists and some hedge funds have noticed that the market is not behaving rationally, yes. The explanations have ranged from geopolitics to solar flares to Neptune in retrograde. But Toby and I have been following the dark pools.”
His brows drew together. “Dark pools? Don’t know what those are, but it sounds ominous.”
“Dark pools originated about fifteen years ago. They are basically an alternative trading system, created as private exchanges. No private individual investors have access. They’re used by large institutional investors to place large orders without unduly rocking the market.”
Raul sat back. The skin around his eyes tightened. “Let me get this straight. There’s like an underground stock market where the rich get to place their bets? Without ordinary people knowing?”
“That’s about it.” Emma nodded. “It’s disgusting, I agree.”
“I’m really glad I don’t have that much money and what I have, I invest in local businesses. And my cousins’ businesses. I have about sixty first and second cousins. Keeps me busy.”
Emma’s jaw dropped, her problems temporarily forgotten. “What? Sixty cousins? You’re joking!”
She couldn’t even begin to imagine a family of sixty people. She had no siblings, her parents had been only children. She had no cousins. Her mother died when she was twelve. Her father slept around a lot and had had an endless succession of mistresses but had never remarried. She heard from him twice a year – at Christmas and on her birthday. At the moment, she didn’t even know where he was.
“Nope. My cousin count is sixty-two and rising.” That firm mouth tilted up slightly as he watched her reaction. “That’s not all. I have three brothers and two sisters, who have all married and produced offspring, and as of now, I have twelve nieces and nephews. Thirteen in November. Rosario’s expecting again.”
“And a partridge in a pear tree?”
That earned her a dazzling smile. “Yep. That’s about the size of it. So, as you can see, I have plenty of investment opportunities.” He spread his hands. “I am the happy part owner of two cleaning companies, a landscaping service, two construction companies, an art restoration company, a boutique publishing house, three restaurants, two coffee shops, a bakery, a travel agency, a lingerie shop and a translation agency. They do me proud.”
