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Oh God. To do that. To actually help people achieve their dreams. To take a seed and watch it grow. Nourish and encourage it. To helpfamily.It was so far from what Emma did, which was to help investment banks suck the markets dry, that it made her dizzy.
Focus. She took a deep breath. “Well, no one is helping anyone right now. The opposite is happening. Stocks are being driven to insane highs and being sold massively at the top of the curve. Markets are often manipulated – by the daily news, by a company preparing for an IPO, by a lot of things. But markets also mostly reflect … reality, for lack of another term.
“Right now, the market isn’t reflecting reality. It isn’t reflecting anything that I can see. But someone is earning a lot of money and hollowing the market out.”
Raul frowned, tilted his head. “How much money are we talking about?”
She sighed, adding up today’s numbers. “I’d say that just today, about two billion dollars has been made in a way that is puzzling and probably illegal.”
“Whoa.” He straightened in his chair. “That’s a hell of a lot of money.”
She bowed her head. “It is. In just a day. Multiply that by 365 days and by twelve months, by the years to come. It has the potential to completely distort the market. It is siphoning off money the market needs to function, to invest in new businesses.”
“Why haven’t I heard of this? I mean I don’t follow the markets but this sounds like something that would hit the papers.”
“Because it’s invisible. Toby and I both noticed it, but we’re deep in the weeds and have access to data most analysts don’t. As a matter of fact –” Emma stopped.
Raul waited. This next part was hard to put in words. He wasn’t putting any pressure on her to talk.
“As a matter of fact,” she continued slowly, “we suspect we might be involved.”
Raul tilted his head to the side, the only sign of surprise. “You and your colleague, Toby, might be distorting the market to the tune of billions and billions of dollars?”
Emma huffed out a little laugh. “No. Hardly. I was using ‘we’ to mean our company, Pacific Investment Bank. It’s … it’s all pretty nebulous though. It was Toby who first wondered if we were involved.”
“Any chance of talking to this Toby?”
Emma shifted in her chair, rearranging the sugar packets. “Ordinarily, of course. But apparently Toby quit and accepted a job in Taiwan that gets a lot of money from mainland China to invest.”
Raul’s gaze intensified. “You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t?” Emma met his gaze. He gazed back steadily. He’d nailed it. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t. That’s just a rumor making the rounds in the office. Toby never even said goodbye. Not to me nor to anyone else in the office. It’s true that we quants are a transient lot. We go from job to job. I’m thinking of changing jobs, too. But – he didn’t say goodbye. That’s really weird because he’s the kind of guy who’d want to go out for a glass of champagne and oysters to celebrate a new job. We are good friends and have a good working relationship. We both like our immediate boss and hate our CEO, Whittaker Hamilton. The third.” Emma found it hard to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. Bad mouthing your CEO was never a good idea, but Raul wouldn’t talk. “So, Toby just disappeared. He didn’t even stop by to clear out his desk. He’s actually still on the company payroll. And then I got this email …”
“What kind of email? Threatening?” Raul’s voice was sharp.
She shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I’m not even sure who it was from. It was an email address I wasn’t familiar with. It was signed Bebop.”
“Bebop, huh. Anyone you know?”
“Nope. I don’t know anyone called Bebop. But once … once Toby came into the office and he was sort of dancing, like in celebration. He’d met this guy at a club the night before. It didn’t last but, man, Toby was hooked. And I said he was bebopping when he came in. That’s the only thing I can think of. The g-mail address was Stevemartin1234. I don’t know anyone by that name. But both of us are big fans of the actor. So – it might be a spoofed email he set up. I tried to trace it back but couldn’t, it’s gone. A one-time email address. Responding to it, the email just bounces.”
“And what did it say?”
Her heart set up a dull thudding. She’d sort of laughed it off but with Raul here, a serious man who took things seriously, she realized how worried she’d been. And still was.
She sighed. “It said –Run.”
2
The back of Raul’s neck crackled like crazy.
But his hormones were crackling, too, interfering with everything.
This never happened. Raul liked women – a lot – and was, um, susceptible to their charms. But not on the job. Never on the job. He switched that part of himself off entirely when working. Thought only with his big head and never with his little head. So … fuck. What was happening to him was allwrong.
He had good instincts for danger and they were firing up like crazy. Just what he’d heard so far – insane amounts of money floating around that no one could account for, a missing person, a warning to Emma – was enough to sound the alarms. Everything in him wanted to wrap his arms around her and cart her off somewhere safe.
But then other parts of him wanted to cart her off, yeah, but not to make her safe. Nope. What he really wanted was to rip her clothes off and touch every inch of that creamy skin and then bury himself deep inside her.
