“I took it from Mister Tate when we married and kept if after he left. Fits a lot better on a business card that Mukhopadhyay.”
Art cringed a little. “I’ll say.”
My turn.
“As long as we’re being all ethno-sensitive, you’re a Spaniard, I take it?”
“Asturian, to be precise. It’s a little principality in the—”
Hari waved a hand. “‘Spain’ is good enough.” She looked around at nearly a dozen flat screen monitors of various sizes arrayed under the fifteen-foot ceiling, all dancing with graphs and banners except for Fox Business News on one, CNBC on another, Bloomberg on still another. “So why does a day trader—I’m assuming that’s your game—need a forensic accountant?”
He indicated a chair and they both seated themselves.
“I’m interested in the activities of a very small brokerage house called Sedam.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Neither has anyone else. They have only one client: The Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order Foundation.”
“Septimus…aren’t they like the Masons or something like that?”
Art shrugged. “I guess. They say they go way back before Mesopotamia, but really, who’s going to buy that? Anyway, what interests me about their brokerage house is that it’s tres conservative. They deal mostly in Spiders. But back in February, early in the month, they began quietly buying puts in the tech sector—lots of puts: Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, anything that relied on the Internet.”
He stopped and his gaze bore into Hari as he let that sink in.
Hari knew immediately where he was going.
Back in February, a mystery camorra launched violent assaults on the Internet’s infrastructure. The attacks were coordinated with the emergence of the so-called Jihadi virus that ran wild across the globe, creating a botnet that crashed the worldwide system.
If Art was to be believed, just before the crash this Sedam brokerage had switched from safe and sane SPDRs to puts on Internet stocks…option bets that those stocks would go down. And of course, they did, following the Internet into the abyss. The net remained thoroughly trashed for days, followed by a week or two of limping improvement. The experts were still crunching the numbers, but the resulting financial loss was estimated at somewhere between one hundred and two hundred billion dollars. Now, three months later, things were back to some semblance of order, but the crash had caused global chaos.
Coincidence?
“That can only mean they knew the crash was coming,” she said.
Art’s expression was grim as he nodded. “’Twould seem so.”
Did he just say ’twould?
“So with all those Internet stocks in the toilet, this Sedam place cleaned up.”
“Really cleaned up.”
Donny arrived with the coffee then, adding, “Sort of like all the puts bought on United and American Airlines before the 9/11 attack.”
Hari had heard stories about that, but didn’t know if they were true or not.
She sipped her much-needed coffee—excellent.
“Donny,” she said, “if Art ever lets you go, you can come work for me—just so you can make coffee.”
“Deal!” Donny said.
“Really?” Art looked offended.
Donny grinned. “But she’s so much better looking than you, Art.”
Hari took that as a compliment, but looking at Art, she wasn’t so sure.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m guessing you want to look into those options, but why do you want me doing the looking?”
Art frowned. “Sorry?”
“Lots of forensic accountants around. Why me?”
“Oh, that was Donny.”
Well, now, this was interesting.
Donny reddened a bit and fumbled out, “Yeah, well, I asked around and someone said, ‘Get Tate. Tate is great.’”
This guy couldn’t lie to save his life. Something going on here, but Art didn’t seem a part of it. All Donny…
Hari decided to play along for now, see if she could suss out Donny’s game.
“‘Tate is Great,’” she said. “Has a nice ring to it.” To Art: “What are you hoping to gain from my looking into those options?”
“Oh, those aren’t my concern,” he said. “I’m more concerned with Sedam’s current activities. You see, after cleaning up on the Internet crash, they went back to their Spiders, but only for a month. Starting early April they began selling off all their holdings—all their holdings. They’re doing it discreetly, so as not to draw attention, but I’ve no doubt they’re doing it.”
“And you know this how?”
He glanced at Donny. “I can’t say. Just let me be clear that there’s no question they’re liquidating.”
Okay, he’d hacked them.
Hari shrugged. “So what? What do you care?”
Art leaned forward, his expression grim. “I wouldn’t care in the least if I didn’t know about their February puts. But I do. They were betting on something happening to the Internet. And something did: one of the biggest social, commercial, and communications disasters ever. If the computer geeks hadn’t been able to fix it so fast, I’d be selling apples on the street—and I don’t mean MacBooks.”
The Internet crash…just three months ago. Every business in the world had been affected, including Hari’s. Amazing how fast they’d repaired or replaced the damaged fiber-optic cables and disrupted the botnet by developing a fix for the Jihad virus. In a matter of only a few days much of the Word Wide Web was back up and running. Not without glitches and bandwidth problems, not business as usual by any means, but people were able to begin to get things done again.
“So…you’re wondering if they’ve got some insider info on another calamity?”
“‘Calamity’ might be too gentle a word for it. Catastrophe? Cataclysm? Apocalypse? They’re no longer working an angle to profit from the market, they’re getting out of the market. Does that mean they suspect that all stocks will soon be worthless? If so, I want to know—I must know.”
Hari shook her head. “I don’t see how a forensic accountant can help you with that.”
“Indirectly, you can. Sedam brokerage is moving to cash, and that cash is, in turn, moving to its source: the Septimus Foundation. But where’s the cash going from there? They can’t be storing it in a vault—they’ve got to be spending it. But on what? Krugerrands? Soybeans? Rare single malts? If I know that, I’ll have a clue as to what they think will happen.”
“How do
