Gen watched them closely. “When was this? And what happened?”
Muttchopf had to tell the story. Three years earlier, a stint with Adirondack, where Vinson had been CEO. Questionable work there, rigging dark pools. Later a gig for Alban Albany, Vinson’s company. It was only work for hire, a contract, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements, as always. While doing the job Jeff had found evidence of malfeasance and taken it to his cousin; they had argued. Then Jeff and Mutt had been fired. This, combined with the loss of their apartment to the watery shallows, had started them on their wandering around lower Manhattan, leading to their arrival at the Met.
“He was cheating again,” Jeff added when Mutt had finished. “Fucking sleazebag that he is.”
“What do you mean?” Gen asked.
Jeff just shook his head, too disgusted to speak.
Muttchopf’s lips were pulsing in and out as he regarded Gen, apparently assessing her level of financial acumen.
“It was a dark pool version of front-running,” he said. “Say you get an order for something at 100. Immediately you go out and buy it for yourself at 100, in the hope that that will drive up the price, meanwhile not fulfilling the first order. If the price then goes up to 103, you sell what you bought, while telling the person who made the order that you couldn’t find a buyer. If on the other hand it goes down to 98, you fulfill the order at 100. Either way you’re good. There’s no way to lose.”
“Nice,” Gen said.
“But illegal,” Jeff said, still disgusted. “I told him that and he just told me it wasn’t happening. He told me to fuck off.”
“What if you had blown the whistle on him?” Gen asked.
“I tried that before,” Jeff said. “When I was working for the Senate. No one believed me, and I couldn’t prove it.”
“It’s hard to prove,” Muttchopf said. “It’s like proving an intention. It happens in nanoseconds. You’d have to have complete records of everything, happening more than once.”
“I could prove it now,” Jeff muttered darkly.
“You could?” Gen said.
“Definitely. Most definitely. He was still doing it when we were canned. He’s been doing it for years. I took snaps.”
Gen stared at them. “So, that sounds to me like a good reason to stash you away somewhere. Do you think he did it?”
“We don’t know,” Muttchopf said. “We talked about it a lot, but we have no way of knowing. Some time had passed, and I’m not sure we really could prove it. And Jeff had just tapped into the CME with his bite, and sent a package with the bitten-off points to the SEC. So it’s complicated.”
Gen thought it over. “Okay, get some rest. We’ve got extra security on this building and on this floor, so you may notice that, but it will just be us. No one is going to be bothering you anymore.”
“Good.”
Next day Gen got a private pouch delivered to her by hand, from Goran’s office. The printed lists of letters and numbers were incomprehensible to her. It looked as if some of them were GPS positions, but other than that, nothing.
Then an hour later Goran dropped by.
“Secure room?” he asked.
“Yes. Faradayed, anyway.”
“Okay, what you’re seeing there is a bunch of remotely operated submarines that were visiting the container every twelve hours, coming over from a very busy dock in Queens. So there’s not much we can do there, without catching one of the subs to help us. There are thousands of people using that dock.”
“So we’re out of luck.”
“Looks like it. But you mentioned Pinscher Pinkerton, so I took a look through the data to see if there were any connections to your case, and found some stuff I thought you’d be interested in. They definitely do security for Alban Albany, and they do personal security for Henry Vinson too. And they’ve been tied to a number of disappearances. Also to some murders, in the opinion of the FBI. They’re on the FBI’s top ten list of the worst security companies. Which is a hard list to crack, and a bad sign.”
Gen pondered this. “Okay, thanks Goran.”
“It will be hard to prove anything about what’s already happened,” Goran said. “If it were possible, the FBI would have already stuck them. Your best bet may be to catch them in the act during the next thing they do.”
In the 1920s a plan was proposed to dam and drain the East River, from Hell Gate to the Williamsburg Bridge, afterward filling in the emptied channel and thus connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn and Queens, while also creating for development approximately two thousand acres of new real estate.
e) Charlotte
Time came for the co-op members to vote on whether to accept the bid on the building from Morningside Realty, fronting for whomever. Charlotte’s half-assed investigations had not been able to crack the fa?ade there, and in any case, no matter who was behind it, the CC&Rs of the co-op required that a vote be taken on matters like this within ninety days of their initiation, and this was day eighty-nine, and she wanted no technical infractions to cause trouble later. She had done her best to ask around and get a sense of what people thought, but really, in a building of forty stories and over two thousand people, it wasn’t possible to catch the vibe just by nosing around. She had to trust that people valued the place as much as she did, and toss the dice as required. In essence the vote would be a poll, and if they voted to sell then she would sue them or kill herself, depending on her mood. She was not in a good mood.
Many of the building’s residents gathered in the dining hall and common room to vote, filling the rooms as they were seldom filled, even during meal hours. Charlotte gazed at the fellow citizens of their little city-state with such trepidation and political distrust that really it seemed like a new kind of fear. Curiosity also was killing her, but there was no way of telling from their faces and manner which way they were going to vote. Most of the faces were familiar or semi-or pseudo-familiar. Her neighbors. Although they were only the ones who had shown up in person; anyone in the co-op could vote from anywhere in the world, and this crowd was probably only half the voting membership. Still, the time was now, and if people were voting in absentia they would have to have already gotten their votes in. So the tally would be finished at the end of the hour.