The Twain Maxim (5 page)

Jim vaulted over the counter, almost landing on the manager, who was hiding behind it. Jane was aiming at the third robber now, a deadly bead, one eye on him and one on Jim.

Jim picked up the dead man’s pistol and pointed it at the third. “Drop the fucking gun,” he shouted.

The robber with the gadget had found the release button for the front door and slung it open, while the third was backed away towards freedom. He kept his pistol pointing at
the floor and began to smile. “It’s OK,” he said, in English, “I’m going. No problems. No problems,” and ran out after his colleague. Jim sprang to the door and watched him jump into a waiting car, which set off with a screech.

Jane pulled the grenade out of the first robber’s pocket and smashed him across the back of the head with the butt of the pistol. He fell with a grunt on to one knee. She administered a second brutal blow, and he fell, limp, to the floor. She uncocked the pistol and put it on the glass counter.

The manager stood up and looked at the pistol, then at Jane. “
Formidable
.” Then, “If I may.” He took the pistol by the barrel and put it out of sight.

Jim ran over to them. “Fuck,” he stated.

“If I may take the gun,” said Henri, “the police will be here shortly and I wouldn’t want them to misunderstand.”

“My pleasure,” said Jim. He slammed the gun down, hitting the jewellery tray. The engagement ring shot into the air and fell behind the counter.

“I’ll pick it up later,” said Henri, with some urgency. He took the gun and put it away.

Jane sat down. “Have you, like, got a pin or something?” she said, holding up the grenade. She glanced at Jim strangely.

“One moment.” Henri looked around. “Albert.”

His assistant was crouching, transfixed, over the dead robber. He straightened up stiffly. Henri gabbled at him, and Albert pushed at the wall behind him. A drawer floated open. He took out several items and instinctively put them on a tray, which he carried over to them.

Jane rolled the hairpins around with her free hand. “Gold might shear.” She picked one out. “What metal is this?”

“Platinum, Madame.”

It had a ruby on the end. “How much is it?”

“A hundred thousand euros.”

“Fine,” she said. “It should work.”

She threaded the hard platinum pin though the grenade’s handle and loosened her grip. The firing lever moved a little and the hairpin twitched, but it held.

“No problem,” she said. She took the handle in one hand and the base in the other, then, with a little grunt, twisted the top. Something gave and she unscrewed the base. She put the green bulb on the tray. “That’s a little bit safer.”

“Henri, where are the police?” asked Jim.

“Probably outside,” said Jane.

A hidden door opened in the far wall and a very tall old man walked slowly out. “Is everybody all right?” he enquired, drifting towards them. He looked down in silence at the body. Three armoured gendarmes stood outside the window. Henri pressed the button and the door buzzed open.

A moment passed, and a senior policeman walked in ahead of his armed troop. “
Ça va
, Monsieur Zera?”

“
Oui
,” said the old man, slowly. “
Ça va bien
.”

The inspector looked at the mess, an eyebrow raised. He passed a few remarks with Zera and then regarded the two young customers. “
Bonjour
,” he said.

“
Bonjour
,” Jane said politely, and shook his hand.

“Hi,” said Jim.

“I am very sorry about this,” said the inspector.

“Don’t be,” said Jane. “It’s proved a lucky escape.”

Jim wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

“Good grief,” exclaimed Max Davas. “What
is
it with you?”

“I don’t know,” said Jim, into his phone. He was slumped in the back seat of a Mercedes limo. “I seem to have turned into a disaster magnet.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Just a bit shaken up,” said Jim, “but I’m getting used to that.”

“And Jane?”

“She’s had to go back to the US embassy, and when they’ve finished with her she’s got to go straight home.”

“I take it she’s unhurt,” said Davas.

“Oh, yes,” said Jim. “Just another day at the office.”

“At least you are both well.”

“I suppose,” said Jim, after a pause.

“You’re quite a couple,” said Davas

“I suppose,” said Jim again. They chatted a little more, then said goodbye and hung up. Jim’s jet was waiting at Orly. It might take longer to get home than it would by train and it might cost a fortune, but he was going to fly in his own plane, dammit. His side was aching – vaulting over that counter hadn’t been such a brilliant idea.

Much later, he was standing by his front door, searching his pockets for his keys, when it opened unexpectedly. He started. “Stafford!” he exclaimed.

“Welcome back, sir.”

“Thank you,” he said, as Stafford took his bag from him. “What are you doing here?”

“As agreed, sir, I have started in your employ.”

Jim racked his brain, “Yes, I suppose we did agree – but how did you get in?”

“I arrived yesterday, and as you were not about I let myself in.”

“I guessed that, but how?”

“There was a key under the mat. I took it that you left it for me.”

“I didn’t leave a key under the mat.”

“Very good, sir.”

“There was a key under the mat?”

“Yes, sir. The previous owners must have left it there.”

He was about to ask why they’d have done such a thing, but found himself observing, “Weird.”

“Yes, sir. Would you like a pot of tea or coffee?”

Jim went into the lounge and dropped down on to a sofa. “Sounds great, but just a mug of builder’s tea.”

“Would that be strong, three sugars and full cream milk, sir?”

“Yes, please,” said Jim, stretching. His side ached, but not too badly. He got up and switched on his computer. His desktop opened up and his picture of Jane crawling under a tangle of barbed wire confronted him. She was covered with mud and smiling like a model.

What a crazy girl she was.

A ton of email shot down into his Outlook as his OC24 1 gigabyte connection sucked it from the Net like a black hole draws in space. At the top he found one from Jane, headed “
Adios muchacho
.”

He clicked reply.

“Tea, sir,” said his butler, placing a small tray beside him.

Jim rolled the chair back. “I’ve just been dumped by my girlfriend,” he said, incredulous.

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

Jim rubbed his forehead and looked back at the screen. He deleted what he’d typed and started again.

He deleted ‘I’. He groaned and turned round. Stafford was gone. ‘I,’ he typed again. He took a mouthful of perfect tea. He looked at his first person singular and couldn’t think of anything to add. He felt a rush of acid to his stomach, which
sent his hand across the table to a half-empty sachet of Rennies. As a trader, antacid tablets were his staple diet.

He opened a chart of ‘cable’, the US dollar versus British sterling price, pushed out a tablet and popped it into his mouth. With the chalky crunch, he tasted peppermint. The price of the pound was going to drop about one per cent in the next two hours, a pretty big move for that Forex pair. His eyes narrowed as his trading front-end loaded. The software came up slowly. He told the robot to sell a hundred million pounds of the cable contract, short, and watched his orders melt into the ocean of the foreign-exchange trades that flood back and forth across the world.

Trillions fluttered every day between computers at the nodes of laser-driven fibres. The wealth of nations flew around the globe while not one atom shifted a nanometre from one quantum of space to another. Almost all of the money in the world was just electric charge on the spinning platters of innumerable computer drives. If money was power and power corrupted, the computer drives remained unscathed, while on their impossibly delicate surfaces lived the sum total record of mankind’s assets. And Jim was doing just great, he thought, imagining Jane lecturing him at the Louvre, until he went soft and his empire turned to dust.

He had
£
50 million at the bank in his trading account and they had given him a hundred times leverage on Forex. It meant, theoretically, that he could trade with
£
5 billion.

Fuck it, he thought, and set his robot off to sell another
£
900 million of the cable contract.

The chart of the day ahead was as clear in his mind as if it was printed on paper. Why had he been pissing around with
small trades for so long? It was time to cane the market. It was time to make the big money.

He was a billion short of the British pound against the dollar and his finger was itching to drop another billion on it. He let the mouse go and watched the chart wriggle. There was no rush. As he stared at it, the chart’s final pixel, representing the actual price in the here and now, seemed to move in time with his heartbeat. “Fuck the pound,” he muttered.

There were 3.5 billion women in the world so the world’s richest man would have a pretty good chance of finding a replacement for Jane – perhaps even someone who couldn’t beat the shit out of him with her little finger.

He dropped another billion on the pound: one per cent of
£
2 billion was
£
20 million. That would be a nice start.

Why had he held back his trading for all this time? He knew what the charts were going to do, and that everyone knew he knew what they’d do, but somehow it had never occurred to him to take his trading to the logical extreme that his abilities allowed. Risk management was for banks that knew shit about what would happen next. Even with departments of mathematicians and compliance officers, they still blew themselves up with stupid trades and clueless traders.

The theory went that you had to be careful when you took a risk because one piece of bad luck could jump up and tear you apart. And bad luck could be so huge that only small risks chasing small profits could survive an onslaught of titanic misfortune. The bank traders played blind man’s bluff and they kept as far away from the cliff edge as they could. Jim, though, could see not only the cliff but had a map of the
countryside and a safety harness attached to a tree. He could play right at the edge and never have to worry. He could smack the markets about at will.

The equity indices were going to be very volatile over the next week, as were the foreign currencies, and that suited him perfectly: he would dig into the market like a bulldozer into sand.

He was already up
£
3 million.

Fuck the pound and fuck the yen too, he thought, dropping a billion pounds’ worth of dollars on to the yen.
£
3 billion in Forex was enough for now.

Nothing was bigger or more explosive than currency trading. The hundred-times leverage made it the crack cocaine of trading. Ten thousand pounds in an account bought
£
1 million in firepower and every one per cent in market moves meant 100 per cent profit and vice versa. If you could call a one per cent move, you could double your money – or be wiped out. It was like roulette without the green and double zeros.

He dropped another billion on to the yen, which sagged a little. He was up
£
10 million and that gave him another
£
1 billion in leverage.

His mug was empty. “Stafford,” he called, and straight away the butler was beside him. “Got another tea and maybe some sandwiches?”

“Certainly, sir. I have in some fine Cheddar.”

“Great,” said Jim, watching the chart flitter.

The butler cast an eye over Jim’s big screens and at the charts that formed outline mountain ranges. “Very good, sir.”

Jim could hardly keep his eyes open. “
£
99,872,312,” said the profit line, as the last six digits spun back and forth. It was three a.m. and he wasn’t going to close until he saw 100 in the millions column. The dollar-pound-yen trio had grown increasingly volatile over the hours he had been playing it and he had been forced to jump in and out of the market like a tap-dancing giant. “
£
99,9” said the first three digits. He started to unload as the number grew to
£
103 million, then began to fall back. His closing was pushing the market against him, but it looked as though he’d get out before the total went below 100. His positions were shrinking as his profits were slipping. “Come on,” he growled at the screen, “you can do it.”

Suddenly the market changed direction and he closed his positions as they chewed through his remaining orders. He was flat – and a
£
101 million richer. “Pretty fucking cool,” he muttered, as he staggered to his feet. This was the way to go. If some lucky bugger could win
£
100 million with a single lottery ticket, why couldn’t the freak trader with two heads do a thousand times better by draining off a small part of the flow of the world’s financial Amazon?

In his bedroom, a new pair of silk pyjamas lay on his pillow, a present from Davas. In moments like this he liked to trace the chart of his life in the air with an index finger, but he was knackered. He flopped on to the duvet and fell asleep.

At eight a.m. Jim was back at his computer, feeling a little groggy. He’d been dreaming about Jane all night. The image of her gunning down the robber had stuck in his consciousness and replayed in his dreams, as had the way she
had knocked the other robber down with the pistol. Fuck me, he thought. Sterling was about to zoom against the yen, dollar and euro. He loaded the robots with
£
3 billion for each pair and set them off buying. The sterling juddered across all the foreign-exchange markets and spiked up a tenth of one per cent. He grunted. He’d better tune down the robots’ aggression next time.

His mobile rang. Caller ID said, “Withheld.”

Someone in the States perhaps?

He snatched it up. “Hello.”

“Mr Evans?”

“Yes,” he said, disappointed and instantly irritable. “What? Who is this?”

“It’s Dale Watkins. I’m in Risk at the bank.”

“So?”

“I’ve been asked to call about your trading.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a bit erratic?”

“How so? Do you mean it’s a bit too big for you?”

“Well, yes, actually.”

“Talk to Wolfsberg and don’t bother me again.”

He hung up.

The phone rang again. “I’m sorry,” said Dale, “but the line went dead.”

“It didn’t. I hung up on you.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I can’t call the CEO, as you probably know.”

The huge trades were going Jim’s way, as he’d expected. “OK, then, I will. I’ll expect your call in fifteen minutes if I don’t get through to him.”

Wolfsberg’s PA connected Jim immediately.

“Al,” said Jim, “I need your help.”

“I see,” said Wolfsberg. “I’m looking at your problem – you’re tripping all the rogue-trader alarms. What do you want to do?”

“There’s some serious action on the way and I want to hit it hard.”

“Looks like you’re pulling a Martingale, Jim.”

“I am.”

“If you keep doubling up on your winnings and then going all in, you’ll get fucked pretty quick.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, huh?” clucked Wolfsberg.

“I want two hundred times leverage.”

Wolfsberg laughed. “Not on my balance sheet.”

“Come on,” said Jim. “What harm can it do?”

“Plenty.” The banker laughed again. Wolfsberg knew there were several reasons why he was the most successful banker in Europe, and at least three of them were Jim. “OK, Jim, you can keep your hundred-times leverage and Martingale your face off, but your old friends on the floor are going to coat-tail you while you’re at it. OK?”

“Is that like enhanced commission?” asked Jim.

“You can call it that if you like. I’ll call it a cat-insurance premium.”

Banks and other companies needed protection from the financial risks associated with hurricanes and earthquakes so they bought derivatives contracts that could be traded like a physical commodity, such as copper or wheat. Following Jim’s trades, perhaps mirroring them, was like buying an insurance policy for a hurricane they knew was coming.

“We’ve done catastrophes, Al. This is just a few sweaty days racking up jumbo profits.”

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” said Wolfsberg. “You’re dealt.”

“Before I go, I want a hundred-times leverage on indices. Currently I’ve only got fifty.”

“OK, Jim, we’re all done.”

He smiled as he hung up. He could almost smell the fun he was going to have.

Jim felt a touch on his shoulder. Fuck, he’d fallen asleep. Did he have any positions?

“Hold on,” he muttered, and squinted at the form on the screen listing his positions.

He let out a sigh of relief. He had nothing open.

“If you’ll forgive me, sir, I thought you’d perhaps forgotten it was four in the morning and might appreciate a reminder.” Stafford’s eyes flickered over the screens.

“Thanks,” said Jim. “That’s good of you.” In the light of the monitor his butler looked like an owl, peering at Jim with a calculating but faintly confused expression. “Don’t let my crazy stuff get you out of bed again.”

“Very good, sir.”