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That was one end of the spectrum. The other end was women who treated him like a barely literate thug.
Emma did neither, she treated him like a highly trained professional, just as she was, only trained in other disciplines. She seemed to respect him for who he was, not a person who only existed in her imagination, to be lusted after for the wrong reasons, or hated for the wrong reasons.
There was a real ease to being with her, like a … a flow. Like the kind he had with his teammates at ASI, only with sex.
Spectacular sex.
The kind of sex he was really looking forward to tonight … Pleasant images filled his head and then Raul saw something on Toby’s monitor when he shot a casual glance their way and thoughts of sex flew from his mind, to be replaced by a shot of pure terror.
“Stop!” His voice was loud, hoarse. Filled with horror. Three puzzled faces turned his way.
12
Toby’s computers had been wiped clean. All they had was the data he’d shared and some he’d saved to the cloud. His memory was almost shot, and it was as if he were seeing the data for the first time.
He hadn’t ever had a chance to lay it all out for her before his kidnapping, he’d only given hints of unease, coupled with the fact that she too could see that something originating inside their bank was distorting the market, in a way that was hard to see, let alone understand.
But though Toby was visibly suffering, was pale and was fighting nausea and a headache, he ran through the data set with her. Whoever had taken him had underestimated him. He was beaten down but not broken.
Emma followed him as he went over his investigation. After a week worrying over data, it became a real investigation. He even laid out the dry wells he dug. She loved it that he was secure enough to point out where he’d made mistakes. He hadn’t made many though.
“So,” she said, after reviewing his data with him, “it looks like this started two months ago. The placing of short sell orders.”
“Two months and ten days ago. March 28th is the first order. I haven’t been able to follow this any further back than then. So, I am just assuming that late March, early April is the starting point of whatever this is.”
“And the shorting grew.” The figures had been astounding.
He shrugged. “Almost exponentially after the first week. That first week everything was tentative. Then the floodgates opened, but most of it in the dark pools.”
“How much are we talking here? In total?” She was speaking to him, but keeping an eye on the data streaming from his monitor.
“About a hundred billion.”
That jolted her. She had a sick feeling in her stomach. “Looking at the shorts, and we can’t be positive we’re seeing it all, if the stocks do decline suddenly, we’re looking at –” she stopped.
“A trillion,” Toby said. “We’re looking at a trillion leaving the market. Like after 9/11.”
She blew out a breath. It was an unspoken fact that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 several trillion dollars exited the economy. Most felt because of short selling, which meant someone knew that 9/11 would happen. Of course, the terrorists knew 9/11 would happen, but the trades weren’t international. They were domestic. No one ever discussed this but it was commonly believed. But if you asked anyone at the top levels of the stock market infrastructure, they would look uneasy and say it was merely an urban legend.
Right.
You had to be low or middling on the totem pole to believe that.
“There’s more. I just remembered something else.”
Emma didn’t see how there could be more but she sat and looked at Toby who’d been so brilliant to pull all this together. If he’d been an investigative journalist, this was Pulitzer level work.
“Yeah?”
“I think it might be naked shorting.” Naked shorting was when the trader had not borrowed the shares. Was operating in the blind.
She closed her eyes and imagined it. Millions of shares being traded and when the date came due … nothing. Naked shorting meant putting enormous pressure on the market because there was no guarantee that the shares being shorted actually existed.
Which was, of course, illegal. And massively disruptive.
“What are they shorting?”
Toby sipped his tea, thinking. “Well, that’s the thing. I looked and looked and nothing jumped out at me. Not like the short selling of airline shares before 9/11. The risk is spread out over tech, commodities, general corporate shares. Agrifood corporations, the energy sector, the automotive sector. Hell, even entertainment. So, there is nothing there.”
