She faced the group.
“Over the past decade we’ve seen a great deal of change in world financial markets. Futures, once a way for producers to hedge their products, are now simply a game of chance, where commodities that don’t exist are traded at prices that bear no relation to reality. We saw this a few years ago when oil topped off at more than $150 a barrel. That price had no relation to supply, which was, at the time, at an all-time high. Eventually, that market imploded and prices plummeted.”
She saw that many in the room agreed with her assessment.
“America is mainly to blame for this,” she made clear. “In 1999 and 2000 legislation was passed that paved the way for a speculative onslaught. That legislation actually repealed older statutes, passed in the 1930s, designed to prevent another stock market crash. With the safeguards gone, the same problems from the 1930s recurred. The global stock market devaluations that ensued should have been no surprise.”
She caught the curious expressions of a few faces.
“It’s elementary. Laws that place greed and irresponsibility before hard work and sacrifice come with a price.” She paused. “But they also create opportunities.”
The room was silent.
“Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of covert speculators sold short a list of thirty-eight stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as the result of any attack on America. They operated out of the Canadian and German stock exchanges. The companies included United Airlines, American Airlines, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Merrill Lynch. In Europe, they targeted insurance companies. Munich Re, Swiss Re, and AXA. On the Friday before the attacks, ten million shares of Merrill Lynch were sold. No more than four million are sold on a normal day. Both United and American Airlines saw an unusual amount of speculative activity in the days prior to the attack. No other airline company experienced this.”
“What are you suggesting?” one of the group asked.
“Only what an Israeli counterterrorism think tank concluded when it studied Osama bin Laden’s financial portfolio. Nearly twenty million U.S. dollars in profits were realized by bin Laden from the September 11 attacks.”
MALONE HEARD THE ROAR OF A HELICOPTER OVERHEAD AND glanced up to see a Royal Navy Westland Lynx sweep past at low altitude.
“NATO,” Stephanie said to him.
At Stephanie’s instruction, the men encircling the woman in the courtyard had lowered their weapons.
“I did as you wanted,” Stephanie called out in French.
The bomber did not reply. She stood fifty feet away and kept her gaze on the arcades that surrounded the Court of Honor. She remained edgy, unsteady, keeping her hands in constant movement.
“What do you want?” Stephanie asked her.
Malone kept his eyes locked on the woman and used the few seconds when her gaze drifted away to ease his hand beneath his jacket, his fingers finding the Beretta that Stephanie had provided a few hours ago.
“I came to prove a point,” the woman yelled in French. “To all those who want to treat us with hate.”
He clamped his hand tight on the gun.
Her hands kept moving, the bomb controller in constant flight, her head flitting from one point to another.
“Who is us?” Stephanie asked.
Malone knew his former boss was playing the scenario by the manual. Keep the attacker occupied. Be patient. Play for a fumble.
The woman’s eyes met Stephanie’s. “France must know that we are not to be ignored.”
Malone waited for her to resume her visual reconnoiter of the cobbled pavement, just as she’d done before.
“Who is—” Stephanie said
The hand with the controller swung left.
As her head pivoted toward the opposite arcade, Malone freed his gun and leveled his aim.
SAM HAD SECRETED HIMSELF JUST BEYOND THE MEETING room’s stage, out of sight. He’d managed to remain inside the room, undetected, as the rest of the staff vacated. The idea had been to maneuver one of them within earshot. He’d watched as Meagan had tried, but was corralled by the other servers to help remove some serving carts. Her frustrated eyes had told him that it was up to him, and he’d made his move.
No security personnel remained inside. All of them had been stationed outside. No danger existed of anyone entering from the doors that led out to the observation balcony, since it was nearly two hundred feet above the ground.
He’d listened to Eliza Larocque’s speech and understood exactly what she was describing. Short selling happened when someone sold a stock they did not own in the hope of repurchasing it later, at a lower price. The idea was to profit from an expected decline in price.
A risky venture in a multitude of ways.
First, the potentially shorted securities have to be borrowed from their owner, then sold for the current price. Once the price dropped, they would be repurchased at the lower value, returned to the owner, the profit kept by the short seller. If the price climbed, as opposed to falling, the stocks would have to be repurchased at the higher price, generating a loss. Of course, if the short seller knew that the price of a given security would drop, and even the exact moment when that would happen, any risk of loss would be nonexistent.
And the profit potential would be enormous.
One of the financial manipulations his and Meagan’s websites had warned about.
He’d heard rumors within the Secret Service about bin Laden’s possible manipulation, but those investigations were classified, handled many levels above him. Perhaps his postings on the subject were what had caused his superiors to apply pressure. Hearing Eliza Larocque say many of the same things he’d publicly speculated about only confirmed what he’d long suspected.