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Toby had set his computer to project on to Colin’s big screen TV on the wall. As they talked, data was scrolling. Emma could see some patterns, and was hoping they would spark Toby’s memory, since this was data Toby had already studied.
“So it started end March?” As Emma interrogated Toby, Colin was staring into space, uninterested. He’d get up periodically and feel Toby’s pulse. He was only interested in the state of Toby’s health. Raul was paying attention, gaze switching from the wall mounted TV to their faces. He probably wasn’t getting much of what was being said or of what was scrolling from Toby’s computer, but Emma trusted him to be able to interpret Toby’s body language.
Toby was scared, weak, shaky but determined. And, underlying it all, angry.
“And it all originated from us?”
“Most of it, yes.” Toby looked her in the eyes. “A set percentage originated from Hamilton himself. He tried to hide his tracks, and he was fairly decent about it, but–” he shrugged.
Emma knew what that shrug meant. Toby was the best.
“And we’re talking …”
“We’re talking maybe half a billion. From him.”
That closed her down. Her boss came from a well to do family but not billionaire class. He earned well but nothing like what would allow him to gamble half a billion dollars. He was dipping into bank funds. Embezzling. Hoping to make the money back before it was discovered.
“Wow.” It was all she could say.
“That’s not all. Other shorts came from bogus accounts. Accounts that hadn’t been active for more than a month. And they, too, originated from Pacific Investment. A lot of effort was made to cover that up, but …” He shrugged again. “Most in dollars, some in Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
Emma found it hard to breathe. She was used to dealing with massive amounts of money, but this – this was an order of magnitude greater. That’s what governments bet.
“So, again, if they were made with some kind of insider knowledge, how much are we talking about if the shorts are successful?”
“A trillion dollars, a billion more or less.”
Emma met Raul’s eyes. For better or worse, a trillion dollars was a scary sum of money. The kind of money that wrecked markets, moved governments. The kind of money won or lost in wars.
“When were these bets made?” Raul asked, his voice sharp.
“Technically, they aren’t bets, they are shorts,” Emma said. “Though of course, theyarebets. Someone is betting that something will happen to throw the market in disarray. Enough to earn a trillion dollars.”
“That’s a lot of disarray,” Raul answered. “Centered around your bank.”
She nodded. Yeah. It was. “Maybe I should go in on Monday and try to see if –”
“No,” Toby said loudly, then brought a hand to his head as if his own voice had hurt him.
“Fuckno!” Raul nearly yelled the words at the same time.
“Whoa.” Emma paused. This was one of the very few times in her life that someone had said ‘no’ to her. It was true her parents hadn’t ever said ‘no’ to her because they were too wrapped up in themselves to care and in school she’d always been a top student and why would the teachers say no? Even at work at the NSA, the Boss from Hell had never told her what to do, only criticized bitterly work that had been done.
So, she didn’t ordinarily take kindly to being told what to do.
But something about Raul’s tone, his clenched jaws and fists, told her he was genuinely worried. And after a second, she realized he was right to be worried. If something really was going on at Pacific Investment Bank, and that something involved a massive amount of money then, yes, she should be staying away.
Staying away put her job at jeopardy. Oddly enough, that raised no emotions with her. With her skills, a job at another bank or hedge fund or analyst firm would be easy to come by. The best thing about her job was Toby, and he was never going back.
“Emma.” Raul stepped toward her then stopped, visibly trying to control himself. “You shouldn’t—”
She held up her hand to cut him off. “You’re right. Sorry.” Turned to Toby. “Tobe, do we have a timeline?”
Raul looked taken aback. He’d been planning on working to persuade her, waiting for her to push back, but she didn’t need persuading. She reached out with a finger to close his lower jaw and turned back to Toby.
“We do.” Toby ran through some data, created a chart. It was visually clear. The short-selling began, in small quantities, at the end of March. Rising, but in tiny spurts, like an experiment. Someone or maybe many someones trying something out. By the morning of the tenth of April, however, the short selling was massive. A tsunami, but done cleverly, in a way that didn’t attract immediate attention.
Most waves of short selling were focused on a single sector and, though no one would admit it, short selling was most often linked to insider knowledge. Wildly illegal but if you made enough money you weren’t sent to jail. You got maybe a slap on the wrist. So, there would be short selling of airline stock or oil or the energy sector, depending on whether there was knowledge of problems at airline manufacturers, or of an unannounced oil leak or a hidden break in the electricity grid. But what she was looking at was across the board, as Toby said. All sectors. She’d never seen anything like it.
