Dead Cat Bounce (8 page)

Pretty soon the Baron gave up even looking at Jonah, such was his confidence in his abilities. He just spoke the orders out loud, so Jonah had to have his ears open to conversation, his eyes on the tickets, and his fingers on the keyboard, all just to keep up. Still, Jonah found the whole thing exhilarating. It was like a race at school, but far more intoxicating. There was the same thrill of leaving everyone in his dust, but this set every nerve ending on fire in a way that Jonah had never previously experienced.

Without meaning to, Jonah slipped into a style of working in which he used his right hand to input the Baron’s trades and his left to do the rest. That way he could keep his eyes on the tickets, and when he heard the Baron announce a trade, he could lift his
left hand up and switch to his right so that there was a division in his information processing.

“How the hell do you do that?” Franky exclaimed. She was standing behind Jonah, double-checking his work when she caught sight of Jonah’s incredible speed and dexterity. Jonah acknowledged the question with a shrug, so focused was he on the task at hand. But inside he felt an indescribable electricity, as if every fiber of his being was telling him that this was what he’d always been meant to do.

“My work here is done,” Franky said more to herself than to Jonah, though she did give him a punch in the shoulder for maximum effect. Then she went off to collect more tickets, only returning to Jonah’s side for any real length of time when he needed her help to read a trader’s writing. Dog’s scrawl, in particular, was horribly appalling, but a few of the others weren’t much better. Jonah was a bit apprehensive the first time he called her over for additional assistance—he’d thought she’d been glad to leave him to his own devices. But if anything, it seemed like, contrary to her behavior yesterday, she was actually quite relieved when her help was required. Every so often she’d say things like, “Ah! You still need me?” and “Not an expert yet, huh?” And while Jonah couldn’t be sure, it felt like as the morning wore on, her words took on a slight bite.

At ten fifteen
A.M.
David Lightbody appeared at the desk. “We’re going to have to leave soon, Jonah,” he said.

Jonah turned around. “No, Dad, not again.”

His father looked around, his expression a mix of disgust and intense apprehension as he took in the frenzied activity. “I have another client meeting, Jonah. And I’m sorry, but I don’t feel comfortable leaving you here by yourself.”

“Who with?” Jonah asked.

“Huh?”

“Who’s your meeting with? Is it that Russian guy again, Scrotycz?”

His dad shook his head. “It doesn’t matter who it’s with. I said it’s time to go.”

Jonah resumed typing. “Dad, I’m inputting trades.”

David sighed. “Are they being nice to you?”

“Really nice.”

“What are you trading?”

The Baron had told Jonah not to tell anyone what they in the Bunker were doing. He’d sat him down and said, “Loyalty, Jonah. That’s what I expect. Even if it’s your dad.”

So Jonah shrugged. “No idea, Dad. It’s just numbers to me.”

“Hmm …” David replied.

Jonah smiled to himself, his attention still on the screens in front of him.

“Well, I can give you twenty minutes, but after that you’ll have to stop entering these mysterious numbers of yours.”

“Dad—”

His father cut him off. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll ask the Baron if you can come back again tomorrow.”

“You will?” Jonah exclaimed. He turned back around to face his dad, a giant smile plastered across his face.

“I will,” David announced, grinning awkwardly in return. “But,” he said, his features taking on their usual stoic arrangement, “don’t get used to this. Tomorrow will be the last time you come to work with me, and that’s only if the Baron says it’s okay. You’ll be going back to
school on Monday evening, and I don’t want you thinking about this place when you do.” With that, David nodded, walked around to the Baron, said a few words in a hush, and returned to Drizzlers’ Den.

The only thing Jonah could make out from his father’s conversation with the Baron was the Baron shouting, “Of course! We’ll have iPod again. Getting to be a regular part of the gang, that son of yours! I’m not sure I’ll ever want to give him back to you.”

Those four sentences were enough to make Jonah positively burst with excitement as he continued entering the trades.

As Jonah typed in the information, it seemed to him as if he wasn’t merely inputting; he was building up an elaborate tapestry from the strings of numbers in front of him. There was a pattern to the trades, and two companies were at the center: River Deep Gold and Mountain High Minerals. But there was also a smokescreen being laid around everything so that most people would just see a series of unlinked buys and sells, the connections hidden to them. Jonah didn’t have time to wonder why the Baron was doing this, but he knew in his gut that his intuitions were correct.

The tally on Jonah’s trading screen kept growing larger and larger as the minutes ticked by—one million, five million, ten million, fifty million, one hundred million, two hundred million, three hundred million, four hundred million, five hundred million—until the Baron called time at ten thirty-two
A.M.
precisely.

“All right, lads, start closing down,” he yelled out, flicking the mute switches on both his phones. “What’s our final tally, iPod?” he asked, turning to Jonah.

Jonah looked at the bottom of the screen, doing a double take when he saw the number. “Five hundred and twenty million,”
he said, forcing his voice to be loud and clear because he knew that’s what the Baron would expect. Inside, though, he was in total shock—
$520 million! That was a huge amount of money.

The Baron seemed satisfied.
“Très fort. Très fort,”
he said. “Half a billion quid and not a sniff of a market reaction. They have no idea what’s going to hit them tomorrow.” He moved his eyebrows up and down and stroked his mustache, a smug smile playing around his mouth.

There were nods all around.

Or nearly. Dog was the only one of the bunch to look confused. “Wait, tomorrow?” he echoed. “We’re not waiting
that long
to really drive it home, are we?”

“That we are, Dog. That we are,” the Baron answered, nodding. “Our resident inputter, iPod”—here he looked at Jonah—“has to leave us again for the great and terrible wonderland that is adolescence. But fear not! He will return tomorrow.”

“What about Jammy?” Jeeves asked.

“What about Jammy?
” the Baron repeated, his tone aggressive, taunting. “I’ll ask Amelia to call him and tell him to take the day off.”

“You’re giving him an extra day of vacation?” Milkshake asked, jumping on board the bandwagon.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it that,” said the Baron, attempting to push his chair under his desk—it wouldn’t go very far considering its sheer size.

“So you’re firing him?” asked Dog, his hands stretched out on his desk in front of him as if he needed to grasp something wooden, solid, to believe what he was hearing.

The Baron stroked his mustache. “Not yet,” he said calmly. Then as if issuing a proclamation, he added, “Let this be a lesson to all of you. If a twelve-year-old can do your job better than you”—Jonah tried to resist the smile that began to take shape at this point—“you probably aren’t true Hellcat material.”

At that, the Baron gave a flourish of his wrist, motioning for everyone to continue about their business, and turned back to Jonah. “But you, sonny, that was good work. You’re quick. Well done. I’m looking forward to having you back with us tomorrow.”

Jonah positively swelled with pride. He didn’t get much praise at home or at school. “What should I do until then?” he inquired.

“Till then?”

“Yeah, is there anything I can do so that I can, you know, go even faster?”

The Baron started cracking up. “You want to go faster?”

“I want to be the fastest.”

There was a glimmer in the Baron’s eyes. “That’s what I like to hear.” He reached into his top desk drawer and pulled out a CD-ROM. “Sometimes we get a little bored, and so to keep sharp we have this training tool,” he explained, handing the disk to Jonah.

Jonah looked down at the case. The label had the letter “A” scribbled on it.

“You install it on your computer at home, and it will link you into our trading system.”

“And this will teach me to be faster?”

“This, Jonah,” the Baron said, using Jonah’s given name for the first time since he’d introduced him, “will teach you to fly.”

When Jonah arrived
home he felt more stimulated than he ever had coming back to his room in the dorms after a class at school. He was so jumpy that he couldn’t be sure whether he wanted to run up to his room to begin trying out the disk the Baron had given him (which was now sitting awkwardly in his pants pocket) or sprint through the streets and shout out at the top of his lungs that he’d just had the best morning of his life. Even better than yesterday’s.

However, this enthusiasm was tempered by the rapid departure of his father. He didn’t even follow Jonah inside the house; he just muttered something about how his meeting “might take all day,” spun around, and marched off back down the road, leaving Jonah to close the door and stand alone in the hallway. For a second he took in the silence of the house, hating it, and the euphoria drained out of him. The house felt hollow and desolate, the exact opposite of the trading floor. Jonah sighed and took off his shoes. He thought about taking them upstairs so that they would be easier to slip on
the following morning for what he’d been told—repeatedly—would be his final trip to his dad’s office. But he remembered how he’d been reprimanded only yesterday morning, and thought better of it. He couldn’t risk it.

So leaving the shoes in the pile by the front door, he trudged up the stairs and began heading for his bedroom. It was the sight of his dad’s closed door that lifted his spirits. He looked both ways and chuckled to himself. It had to be done!

He pushed the door open and walked straight into his dad’s room, his steps deliberate and his mind as singularly focused as it had been at the bank. The room’s walls and carpets were beige, and there were old newspapers strewn about, giving the space a disheveled effect that ran counter to the composed air David Lightbody attempted to project. But Jonah didn’t reflect on what any of that meant. He went directly to his dad’s wooden armoire and opened one of the smaller drawers at the top. In it, he found what he was looking for—his father’s tie collection. He ran his fingers along the silk material and reached through to the bottom to grab what he hoped was his dad’s least favorite tie, and thus the one he’d be least likely to notice was missing. The tie he extracted was green with little flags all over it, nothing like the striped navy tie that the Baron had worn that morning, but it would do.

He carefully closed the drawer and headed back out to the landing where the silence enveloped him once more. This time though it didn’t worry him as he looked at the tie and felt the circular shape of the disk in his pants pocket. He was going to recreate the trading floor in his head using the Baron’s training tool!

Energized once more, he bounded across the hall into his own
room. There, he awoke his desktop computer from sleep mode and swept his whopping two track trophies out of the way as he sat down in his grey, fabric desk chair. He pulled the disk out of his pocket, placed it into the drive, and carefully tied the tie around his neck while he waited for the old computer to chug to life.

It took him two attempts to knot the tie to his satisfaction, and as he finished a red triplane appeared on the computer screen. The plane swept upward to reveal the German Iron Cross on the underside of its wings before disappearing to be replaced by the words “LEVEL ONE—Ours is the invisible hand. Do you have what it takes to join us?” Jonah screwed up his face in puzzlement as three options popped up: “New recruit,” “English Dummkopf,” and “Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen.”

He waved his fingers in a moment of indecision before hitting “New Recruit.” Text scrolled up the screen, telling him about the pilots of World War I and that the greatest of them all, with more than eighty kills, was the German pilot Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, more commonly known as the Red Baron. Jonah snickered, thinking that it was probably a good thing that he hadn’t selected what was obviously the Baron’s preferred character.

As soon as the text finished scrolling, the red triplane reappeared along with a graphic of keyboard controls showing how to land and take off, to turn and climb, to navigate and shoot. At this point, Jonah’s puzzlement transformed into laughter that grew louder and louder until finally he had to hit “pause.” How had the Baron called this a training tool?

This—Jonah was pleasantly shocked to discover—
was a video game.

“Scramble! Scramble!” shouted
the Baron the next morning. “Let’s go! Let’s go! iPod, you’re going to need to be really sharp this time. There won’t be any tickets. We’ll all be hollering at you, not just me.”

“Why? What’s happening?” Jonah asked, pulling at the tie he’d “borrowed” the previous afternoon.

The Baron shifted back to his desk and settled into his seat triumphantly. “The news is out! River Deep Gold is going to buy Mountain High Minerals. Market’s moving. Probably shouldn’t have waited for you to come back to us, but hey, when I start something with someone, I like to finish it.”

Jonah thought he could hear Dog whisper something nasty under his breath. A second later, he and Jeeves were cracking up.

“Ignore them,” said the Baron, eyeing Jonah directly. “Nice tie by the way.” Jonah was about to say thank you when the Baron once again undercut his attempt at pleasantries. “No time for that. Get
yourself set. We’re going to be clearing out any minute now.”