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She tilted her head, considering. “Yeah. I never really analyzed it. I generally keep work relationships separate from the rest of my life, but Toby’s a lot of fun. Easy to talk to. And wicked good at his job. And though we didn’t complain out loud at work – the NSA broke me of any semblance of honesty on the job – we understood at a glance when something was wrong. Which has been all the time recently.”
There it was. Most problems begin with something being wrong. “Wrong? Wrong how? Walk me through it.”
She shrugged, frowned. “It’s a bank. An investment bank. It plays with other people’s money. Markets go up and they go down. Toby and I just track it, analyze the movements, but the others in the bank, the investment department, customer relations, asset management, they can get jittery when stocks fall. But jittery isn’t a good look for an investment banker so it usually translates into aggression. Toby and I knew to avoid absolutely everyone when there were losses. We’d keep our heads down, give each other the side-eye when people walked by, and we went out for cocktails afterward. And then sometimes things went really well. When things were going well, we had totally separate lives. He’d take off for the clubs. In a way, we were sort of bad-weather buddies.”
Raul could relate to that. There were a couple of teammates who’d transitioned through the teams that weren’t fun to know as people. But when the bullets started flying, they all instantly became best buds and had each other’s backs.
Bullets weren’t flying here, but something was happening.
“Tell me about the last month.”
“More like the last three months.”
He nodded. “The last three months, then.”
Emma pursed that pretty mouth and Raul concentrated on what she was saying and not how her mouth looked saying it.
“Well, the market was its normal schizophrenic self a couple of months ago, but then something happened. It was like PIB got some kind of dispensation. We never lost money. Not once. That just doesn’t happen.” She leaned forward a little and looked him right in the eyes.
She really shouldn’t do that, he thought in alarm and almost drew back before he stopped himself. Her gaze was mesmerizing. He’d never seen eyes that intense before, like they could light up a room. It messed with his head, made him feel like he was falling into her. He had to wrench his gaze from hers and ostentatiously checked the door, the tables, the open kitchen. No crazed killers had entered in the five minutes since he’d last checked. Finally, he brought his gaze back to hers and fell right back into her eyes.
Had to focus hard on what she was saying.
“Remember we’re talking about the market. Theworldmarket. Something bad is happening somewhere, every second of every day. Never losing is nearly impossible. No, scratch that. Itisimpossible. A really good day is when you lose five million dollars and make nine. It was like PIB was receiving memos from God. All our investments were golden, but there wasn’t a good feel to it. Toby and I met a couple of times after work and compared notes and never understood what was going on. And remember, understanding what’s going on is the very heart of what Toby and I do. That’s what the quant department does. I mean, there could well be outside forces conspiring to make something like PIB lose a lot of money. But neither of us could figure out what could conspire to make PIB a lot of money with no losses.”
“No losses at all?”
She stopped and watched him. “I think a suitable analogy would be during a firefight where a million bullets are shot, but no one is hit.”
“Yeah. That doesn’t happen outside the movies. So, what did you and Toby do?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. What could we do? The company was making money – a lot of it – which is why we were there. The other quants were clueless, and basically didn’t care. One of them is actively looking for another job in New York and isn’t paying any attention at all. Another is getting married this month. I wrote a memo to our immediate boss that something was off, but got no answer. I got an acknowledgement and that’s it. He’s a nice guy but really, his job isn’t to question making too much money. Last month we made a bigger profit than in Q3 and Q4 of last year combined. And the trend is rising.”
She sighed. “It’s a problem, but a problem a lot of hedge funds and banks would kill to have.”
Silence. Emma drew a pattern in the white tablecloth with a pink-tipped fingernail. She hadn’t heard what she’d said but he had. A situation people wouldkillto have.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Raul asked. “You’rereallyworried about Toby. And –” Emma’s head was bowed and she was staring at the tabletop. Raul bent to look her in the eyes. “I think there might be something else, too.”
She blinked as she thought. He could almost see things whizzing around in the beautiful red-haired head. “Mmm,” she murmured.
Yeah. Something else. Raul was good at interrogating. He was a human lie detector and could read people very well. Emma wasn’t lying but she wasn’t telling the entire truth.
However – this was a smart woman. And she was a good friend of women he considered good friends of his. He wasn’t going to bully intel out of her and he wasn’t going to coax it or trick it out of her. She had to volunteer it, because he was here to help.
So, he sat back and waited. He had patience to spare. And since she wasn’t a dummy, she’d realize that he had flown over six hundred miles to help her, and the smart thing to do was to tell him everything.
Finally, she sighed. “It’s all so nebulous,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
“Uh huh.” Raul kept his features without expression. “Intel usually is. We work on probabilities. On breaks in patterns, on slightly unusual activities, on someone not being somewhere he should be. On a thousand clues you have to put together, and sometimes it’s 50-50 whether you’re right or wrong. There is no such thing as chancing on an email that says we will hit this target on this day at this hour. Nope. What you’ll have are contradictory signs, a flurry of activity here, some decrypted messages about packages and deliveries there and you have to piece it all together, knowing about sixty percent of what’s going on if you’re really lucky. No one ever knows a hundred percent of the intel. So then, I guess what you have are bits and pieces.”
She looked him full in the face again and again he had to work to keep his face bland. He forbade himself from studying her features because he didn’t want his eyes moving. He kept his head straight and his gaze unwavering. But he was observant and could soak in the details of that beautiful face. That amazing skin, creamy and smooth. The straight nose, full lips, high cheekbones. The glowing radioactive blue of her eyes. A remarkably attractive woman who did not give off alook at mevibe in any way. Did not preen, did not constantly check him to see what her effect on him was, did not tilt her head coyly.
He’d been on the receiving end of all that countless times, with women much less attractive than Emma Holland.
There was none of that. She gave off the vibe of your aunt Sally, the retired librarian, low-key and engaged with the person she was talking to. But then she worked in a man’s world, so would want to keep all that sex appeal under wraps.
Raul had heard the stories from the guys, and they were pretty awful. The four women had shared a period together at NSA and had had the boss from hell, and all four had gone on to other jobs and had had run-ins with sexist jerks. Felicity had confessed to him and Pierce that she never had the courage to tell her husband, Metal, about how she’d suffered sexual harassment at a think tank she worked at, very briefly, in New York. She felt that Metal would take a plane, find the man and beat him to a pulp. So, she’d said nothing.
