As if called, Claire showed up, Olmstead in hand. When they were seated Gen regarded her whiteboard unenthusiastically. The big screen on the other wall, filled with a live GIS map of the city marked by various kinds of tags, was just as uninspiring.
When they got to it, near the end of a long list of outstanding problems, Claire reported there were still no pings from the two men who had gone missing out of the old Met tower. Quite possibly they were dead. On the other hand, among bodies found recently, none had been them.
Possibly they had slipped away and were hiding for some reason. Possibly someone had kidnapped them. Either would be odd, but odd things definitely happened. People were well documented these days, not in any single system, but in the stack of all systems, the accidental megasystem. It was hard to stay hidden. But it wasn’t a total system in the end, so it could happen.
Olmstead brought her up to date on what he had found in the datasphere, and Gen drew things on the whiteboard, just to help her see: initials, Xs and Os, arrows here and there, lines solid or dotted.
The two men’s contract work for Henry Vinson’s hedge fund, Alban Albany, had ended just three months earlier. Alban Albany, like most hedge funds, kept its financial activities proprietarial, but Sean had found signs that it was involved in high-frequency trading in the dark pools run out of the Cloister cluster. Vinson’s earlier work for Adirondack Investing, when he had worked with Larry Jackman, had done that kind of trading, and Rosen and Muttchopf had worked for Adirondack too. Adirondack had been one of the investment firms the Senate Finance Committee was looking at when Rosen had recused himself. Rosen and Muttchopf’s recent work for Alban Albany had gotten them paid forty thousand dollars apiece. Then they had left and started moving around.
Vinson’s business security and his personal security were both handled by a security firm called Pinscher Pinkerton. An international firm, based in Grand Cayman if anywhere. Very opaque, Olmstead said gloomily, even though its name was out there, as one of the free-floating armies for hire that were now roaming at large in the world. An octopus, as subsidiary-stacked corporations were called. Or more probably an arm of a bigger octopus.
On the night Rosen and Muttchopf had disappeared, Sean said, there had been a strange event in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A bite across everything in the exchange, after which everything went back to normal. Along with the bite, there had been a bolus of information sent to the SEC that the SEC wasn’t talking about. No obvious connection to the two men, except that it had happened that night.
“It would be good to get the SEC to tell us what they got that night.”
“I’m trying,” Olmstead said. “They’re slow.”
That was all they had that was new on that case. Olmstead had also, at Gen’s behest, been looking into the bid on the Met tower that had so troubled Charlotte. So far he had only managed to confirm that it was being laundered through the big brokerage Morningside Realty, headquartered uptown but doing business all over the tri-state region.
Gen marked up her whiteboard. Findings about the two men were in red. The Met tower was a blue box, with Charlotte Armstrong on one side of it and Vlade Marovich on the other.
She noodled around on the board for a while, trying out scenarios. They needed to find out what Vinson’s hedge fund was doing, and whether it was perhaps behind the broker making the bid on the Met. Needed to investigate all Vlade’s employees in the Met. It was a relief to think that neither Charlotte nor Vlade had a good reason to be involved in the disappearance, but Gen was suspicious of her relief. Feelings like that caused one to miss things. On the other hand, it was an intuitive business.
Suppose the two missing men had dived into Alban Albany’s dark pool while they were working there, then set up the access needed to make the flash bite in the CME. That might explain the quick response suggested by their disappearance on the same night. In high-frequency trading terms, an hour was like a decade.
Or, suppose Vinson was behind Morningside’s offer on the building, and Rosen and Muttchopf had found out about it, or somehow interfered with it. Might be standard at Alban Albany to stovepipe any corporate decisions on Rosen directly to Vinson; might be his people had instructions to keep an eye on the boss’s cousin. A black sheep patrol, that was called; many families had to have them, including families in the NYPD.
As she noodled away randomly at the whiteboard, Sean and Claire regarded her fondly. The inspector was so old school. To her young assistants it was partly cute but partly impressive, in a mysterious and possibly even frustrating way. She often got results from this whiteboard maundering, useless though it appeared. Although from time to time Sean would shake his head, even raise his hand. “This is exactly what it isn’t,” he would complain. “It isn’t a diagram, it isn’t mappable. You’re confusing yourself with this stuff here.”
“A thread through the maze,” she would reply. “The maze was always four dimensions.”
“But think six dimensions,” Sean would suggest.
And she would shake her head. “There’s only four dimensions, youth. Try to keep your head on.”
And he would shake his head. So old school! his look would say. Only four dimensions! When there are clearly six! Which Gen would refuse to ask him about. She didn’t want those two extra dimensions, so clearly fictional, explained to her. Let the youth navigate that realm.
Now she asked them what they had managed to dig up on the black sheep front. The two cousins apparently had lived in the same house for a time, after Jeff’s childhood home got inundated in the Second Pulse. This might have led to fraternal feelings or to lifelong hatred. Fifty-fifty on that, but only after starting with another fifty-fifty split, as to whether the cohabitation had produced strong emotions or complete indifference. But even that suggested a twenty-five percent chance that later on Vinson would be keeping tabs on his black sheep coder cuz.
And yet he had hired him twice for jobs. One of these hires, well after Rosen had recused himself while Vinson was being investigated. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer? Keep the black sheep in the pen? Then comes a flash bite on the CME. Trust among traders easy to lose, hard to regain. So, put the black sheep out to pasture, somewhere far away.
“Too many theories, not enough data,” she said, at which observation her assistants looked relieved. But she had a sense that the explanation might be somewhere on the whiteboard, no matter Olmstead’s objections. Garbled no doubt, but the players were there. Maybe. If it was a case that made sense; sometimes they just didn’t. “See if you can crack Morningside Realty’s confidentiality.”
Olmstead wrinkled his nose. “Hard without a warrant.”
“We won’t get one. See if you can suborn someone there.”
Her assistants snorted in tandem.