'Friends of mine.'
'Yes, I see.' But Chen had risen in his seat, sensing trouble.
And at that, in the moment that changed the tone of the evening, Martz leaned forward and ever so gently pushed him back down.
Chen froze.
'My friend,' said Martz, 'we have now arrived at the part of the evening that is most meaningful to me.'
Chen sat quietly, senses alert, hands gripping both arms of the chair. His bodyguards were sitting around in the aforementioned Time Warner building, drinking beer and watching American cable TV, probably. He'd let Martz send a car for him and hadn't wanted his men to come along. A mistake, he seemed to understand now, a mistake that a genuinely rich man in America would never make.
Martz turned back to him. 'Chen, you are here tonight for only one reason. Through my company I am a major investor in a small, very promising drug manufacturer called Good Pharma.' He beckoned to the translator, a slim Chinese-American doctoral student at Columbia University, to come join them. The other men sat at a table near the elevator opening up laptop computers. 'Start translating everything I say. I don't want any misunderstandings. I want him to get to know your voice and I want you to get to know his.'
The translator greeted Chen with formality. Chen's eyes cut back and forth between Martz and the other man.
Martz resumed. 'My friend Hua here has worked for me for eight years. He knows your regional accent. He will translate. You have recently been trading in Good Pharma, short selling it and driving the price down. And by you, I mean you and all the Chinese investors you advise. Very impressive, except that you did this using stolen information.'
The translator repeated this.
'I am listening,' Chen said in English, as if looking for a chance to negotiate.
'Tonight, you are going to call your fellow investors in China, one by one, and tell them to buy Good Pharma when it starts trading at ten a.m. local Shanghai time. They are going to buy in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and everywhere else they do business.'
'Why would they do that?'
'Because you will tell them to.'
Chen shook his head. 'That would not be enough.'
'I suspect that you will make a convincing case.'
'How?'
'Very simple. You will tell them that you have more inside information. Very good information that will make them a lot of money.'
Chen said nothing.
'Hua will be sure that you tell them what you say you are telling them. In fact, we have a device here that creates a ten-second delay in spoken telephonic conversation. It was developed by radio stations for the purpose of blocking any accidental transmission of FCC-prohibited language.' Martz pointed at the translator. 'Got that? Did he understand that? This device is also used by unscrupulous traders to front-run major trades ordered over conventional telephone lines. It's illegal because it is so effective. Hua will listen to everything you say and if he feels that you aren't speaking exactly to them as we have instructed, then he'll hit a button on the unit and your voice will disappear.
'Furthermore, Mr. Phelps, one of the men at the table over there by the barbecue range, will be watching your voice on a stress analyzer, and if he feels that your voice sounds like you are lying, he will knock out the tones at the high end so that a stress analyzer on the other end, or the human ear, which in my opinion is just as good, will not hear any suspicious tones in your voice. Mr. Phelps had twenty-three years with the CIA and is well versed in these techniques. Mr. Phelps?' he called.
Phelps came and stood before Chen, with his hand out.
'You will now surrender your cell phones and electronic devices and so on.'
Chen gave him two phones and a beeper.
'Please remain comfortable,' Martz said. He got up to go see Elliot on the other side of the terrace.
'Everything okay?'
'Hi, Billy Martz. Yes, we're set up, more or less. I spent the day at the office getting everything ready.' He had three screens open, powered off one of the waterproof exterior plugs that Connie used for her elliptical motion machine that she kept stored on the roof, spending hours climbing a little closer to heaven or wherever it was his wife ultimately planned to arrive.
'You have all your power, all your communications?'
'Yes.'
'Is it technically very difficult?'
'This technology has been around for a while now. You want tricky technology, go play around with stem cells.'
'If you say so.'
'Bill, you're turning into a fussy old man.' Elliot smiled, patted him on the back. 'You go do your thing and I'll do mine.'
But he lingered, looking over all the equipment, amazed at how small it was, except for the large white transmission cone on a ten-foot telescoping tripod that had been hauled in and positioned earlier in the day. The key to a successful lift, Martz knew, now that almost everything electronic was traceable, was to move the communication not just from place to place, and from government jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but across technologies. Moving across each of these boundaries made it harder for any interested authorities to re-create the sequence of illegal communications. From what Martz understood, Elliot's men would, that evening, be communicating directly with a boat about one hundred feet offshore in New York Harbor. The mode was a digitally compressed and encrypted microwave beam, which required line-of-sight transmission and was effective only up to a few miles. Did not travel with the curvature of the earth. It couldn't be used on foggy or rainy nights, either. You shot it at a receiver the size of an umbrella, the beam a quarter inch wide. But it was absolutely untrackable. It was so good Citibank used one to shoot data from its famous headquarters on East Fifty-third Street to its back-office operations facility in Queens, built for that purpose in a line-of-site location on the other side of the East River. He watched the men go about their business. They'd spent hours checking and rechecking the transmission vector. The boat, papered with a Liberian registry, had a phone uplink to a private Dutch satellite network used only by shipping companies, and the data packets were in turn relayed and downlinked to a Greek shipyard that was owned by Elliot. The yard was filled with rusty tankers needing overhaul, but the fiber-optic cables running under and around them were state of the art. With this arrangement, Elliot could speak more or less untraceably to anyone in the world. The many legs of the communication degraded the sound quality and added a little delay, but not too much, perhaps four seconds.
But this was not all that Elliot did, not by any means. After all, anyone with a few million bucks and an antisocial personality could set up an untraceable mix-tech, global com-link. Mr. bin Laden, for example, among other miscreants. Elliot's real value, and the reason he was effectively paid millions of dollars for what amounted to perhaps seven or eight hours of service, was that he made things happen that otherwise could not; he provided capital and the smarts to leverage it to the greatest possible illegal effect. He and his tiny band of infidels had researched several thousand stock price surge patterns and painstakingly built a proprietary trading program that followed the documented natural arc of these surges using best-fit modeling within a field of scattershot data points. He then started to buy the stock in question and drive up the price, of course. But that was not all; once Elliot's trading gambit began, he didn't just slavishly recapitulate the curve with simplistic buying and occasional selling; instead he created it organically, he birthed it, which was to say that he used several thousand linked trading platforms that he empowered with randomizing block-size choosers and let run autonomously, giving the platforms a buy bias but also letting them react in real time and differentially to spontaneous market information. This meant that he allowed some of his trading platforms to make 'bad' decisions, very much the way real flesh- and-blood traders did, getting in or out of a market surge too early or late. He also employed a mix of the patterns typically utilized by day traders, retail brokerages, private wealth managers, investment banks, and big institutional players such as pension fund managers and mutual fund companies. His platforms traded not just with and against all the legitimate traders in the market but blindly against each other as well. The result was not a simulation of a
