been like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Anne Marie was a player. Her Marinaccio Group, known simply as the MG, was run from offices in Dubai, but domiciled primarily as a discretionary macro oil futures hedge fund in Mauritius. The MG was valued at $498 billion, but heavily leveraged with actual investments, some through derivatives, of something under $50 billion, which was about three times the amount she’d taken from her investors in a mammoth U.S. real estate scheme six years ago. She’d been forced to leave her estates in the Hamptons, Palm Beach, and the Sonoma wine country to the feds and take her private jet to Dubai, whose sheikhs greeted her and her money — despite her gender — with open arms. She was their kind of wheeler-dealer.
Tall and fit-looking for a woman of fifty-two, Marinaccio’s undyed salt-and-pepper hair, deep, expressive eyes, and somewhat chiseled features reminiscent of the Redgrave actresses, lent her the aura of success. Heads turned when she entered a room; men were intrigued and their women were instantly on guard, even if they didn’t exactly know who or what she was. And it pleased her. It was in her nature.
She was a fighter, too, with a track record to prove it. But the world had gotten much smaller since her days stateside, when she had half a dozen senators in her pocket, along with twice as many representatives, all in on her mortgage-flipping schemes that had racked up some fabulous profits. She’d funded five top-ranked lobbyists who worked both sides of the aisle along with the Americans for Tax Reform to head off increasing scrutiny of the commercial banking industry that was making questionable loans, billions of which Marinaccio Group arranged through dozens of partnerships, mostly in the two prime housing markets — Florida and California.
She had figured that the boom had to end sooner or later and when it did banks would fail and a lot of important people, who had trusted her to continue making them even richer than they already were, would be seriously hurt. And when she saw it coming, smelled it in the wind on Wall Street, knew it in her gut, she had made one final push — leap, actually — and when she walked she was a multibillionaire, her money safe in the Saudi-run International Bank of Commerce in Prague, in Syria, and, of course, in Dubai, and lately MG’s fortune in Mauritius.
It was those important people stateside who wanted to get to her. Which meant that for the past six years her travel had been restricted, and lately she had begun to chafe at the bit, thus this trip to test the waters in a way. And to take her mind off her latest set of troubles, because if her oil ventures failed — and there was a more than even chance now that they would, especially because of the money she’d poured into Iraq — the Middle East would be gone for her, leaving her Russia or China, in a worst-case scenario Cuba, or with her friend in Venezuela.
The Med was calm this afternoon. Standing in the ultramodern and expensively furnished Italian-designed saloon with a glass of Krug in hand, she could see the Marseille skyline far to the hazy north. This morning the captain had asked if they were returning to their berth at Monaco, but Anne Marie had merely shaken her head. She figured she would need at least a few more days to work out her next moves.
Run? If she did that she would be out of the business, possibly for good. On the surface it wouldn’t be so bad to retire somewhere. She had plenty of money, and when she got back she would begin siphoning even more cash from the fund into a few untouchable private offshore accounts. Her investors, especially some of the Saudis, would send someone after her naturally. But she had the means to fight back, and if need be it’s exactly what she would do, fight fire with fire. But her strike would be harsh beyond measure. It was something her father, one of the original hedge fund managers back in the late fifties and early sixties, would have done.
“The whole notion of minimizing risk at the expense of reducing profits is a load of pure horseshit,” Thomas Senior stated flatly at his daughter’s graduation from Harvard Business School. Anne Marie had inherited her dad’s tall, slender frame and good looks, along with a few million when the old man had put a 1911A1 Military Colt .45 to his temple and blew his brains out. When he had been alive though the old man had never been shy about offering his opinions whether they’d been asked for or not. Anne Marie, who had followed in his footsteps, first with a BA in accounting from Loyola, her CPA from DePauw, and finally a Harvard MBA, had also inherited that trait.
“Al Jones got it wrong,” Senior had told the group of MBA graduates gathered around him and his daughter on the Yard. Jones had been the financial wizard who’d created the first hedge fund in 1949, buying assets he thought would go up and selling those that he expected to fall. The man was hedging his bets. “That’s the way the market works when pansies weak in the knees make their trades.”
“And now?” one of the newly minted MBAs asked politely, even though they all knew what the answer would be.
Senior looked at them as if he were seeing a bunch of English lit majors who wouldn’t be expected to know the difference between a high-water mark and a hurdle rate or a discretionary macro strategy versus a systematic macro — which in his opinion was no strategy at all. Letting computer software direct your buy-sells was for idiots and cowards.
“Profits!” the old man roared.
“At all costs?” the same young man asked.
And then Senior, realizing that his leg was being good-naturedly pulled, smiled. “Is there any other way?”
Anne Marie had been proud of her father that afternoon. Senior had been a player right up to the end when the markets crashed in ’87, and although his funds had lost only 10 percent of their NAVs, or net asset values, it was enough because they’d all been leveraged to 90 percent. For every dollar his funds had lost, they’d wiped out nine. And it was over.
Anne Marie took the bottle of Krug out to the aft sundeck and sat back in one of the chaise lounges, a dark scowl on her features. She was dressed in a white lounging suit and she was aware that she looked good. But she couldn’t keep her mind away from her troubles. Her situation was a lot more complicated, but she was heading toward the same net effect that her father had faced. This cruise had been meant to recharge her batteries, figure a way out, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to put a pistol to her head. But she was lonely now. She’d had three high-profile marriages, the last one to a Hollywood star that had ended six years ago when she had to get out of Dodge and he refused to leave with her. She had her staff, but they couldn’t be counted on to share a confidence; most of them would see it as a sign of weakness, typical for a female, and jump ship.
The only man she could count on was Gunther Wolfhardt, a former German intelligence officer who Anne Marie had been introduced to by a high-ranking assistant to the UAE’s minister of finance, Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, as a good man to have in one’s employ. Especially in the sort of business ventures that Anne Marie might be interested in pursuing and, of course, because she was a woman in a man’s world.
As a young KGB lieutenant, Wolfhardt had been a killer for the East when the Germanys were separate countries, and after they’d united, he’d headed farther east, ending up in Prague, where he somehow came to the attention of the Saudis.
The exact details of why Wolfhardt had suddenly fled the Czech Republic and turned up in the UAE, where he did the royal family favors from time to time, were fuzzy. Nor was Anne Marie interested in finding out. Instead she’d created what she called the special projects division of the MG, and gave Wolfhardt a healthy budget and free reign. Her orders were to fix things that needed fixing. If some investor somewhere got cold feet and wanted to back out, Wolfhardt and his string of freelancers would arrange an unfortunate accident, or perhaps a stroke or heart attack, and even the occasional home or business fire or terrorist suicide bomber.
Anne Marie had immediately connected with the German because they were of like minds; they were survivors, and nothing else mattered, though there was no love between them.
But Gunther wasn’t here now, only the two bodyguards he’d arranged for were, so there was no one to talk to. No one to confide in.
Primarily the Marinaccio Group, with Anne Marie as the sole manager, dealt in oil futures, a lot of the risk propped up by derivatives among the oil suppliers, mostly OPEC and the refineries in the U.S., India, and China. It was nothing more than insider deals between the producers and the users who agreed to set a price and deliver a set amount of oil. The people who pumped the oil were assured of a market, the refiners were assured of a steady supply, and cash could be made on the promises.
All that had been fine, especially when oil had approached the $150 per barrel mark. But she’d made a few side deals, pumping a lot of the fund’s money into China’s industrial revolution. The higher China’s per capita income rose, because of farmers coming into the cities to work in the factories, the more automobiles and trucks they would need, ergo an increased demand for oil.
The problems came one after the other: Americans reduced their driving when gasoline hit $4 a gallon and
