T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

Next to each top trader sat an assistant, there to ensure all trades were recorded and confirmed by accounting. The assistants were all young wannabes, learning the ropes and waiting like vultures for the ax to fall. Their constant hunger was a huge reason why the trading floor remained one of the tensest working environments on earth.

This afternoon the forex action was focused two rows away from where Colin stood. A junior trader shrilled, “I think somebody’s trying to push Canada around! I’ve got three back-to-backs for fifteen each!”

Such sudden moves happened occasionally in late-afternoon trading. A big guy might select what felt like the day’s weakest currency and seek to push the nervous Nellies into panicking before the closing bell. Which was why Alex, the spot market’s senior trader, was on his feet, riding his staff hard, using his voice as a whip. “Buy forty-five!”

The junior trader hesitated. “The price has just pumped up a hundred points.”

A hundred points was a full cent, a huge rise for one afternoon. Enough to draw Colin over to Eric’s desk, where he could watch the action with someone in the know. Alex retorted, “It’s a bluff. Hit the bid.”

The trader handling the Canadian dollar desk was a young woman unused to the frantic muscle hitting her now. She shrilled the words, “I’m offered forty more!”

Eric sat and swiveled his chair around, back and forth, pumping out the energy, watching the scene like he would a favorite movie. Eric’s desk handled dollar-euro, a thousand miles from this afternoon’s action. Eric said to the trader on his right, “Five hundred says she enters meltdown before the market closes.”

“You’re on.”

Eric leaned back, said to Colin, “You want some of the action?”

“I’m just a lowly backroom boy,” Colin replied. “I’ll just sit and watch, thank you.”

Alex shouted back to his junior lady, “Buy forty.”

“Ninety more! And another fifty!”

“Do it all!” The senior trader had sweat rings from his arms to his belt. No surprise there. If he was wrong, if this was a legitimate swing and not a late-afternoon gamble, this would be his last day on the floor. Every trader had a loss limit over which he or she could not stray, at least not for the end-of-day postings. Any time a trader approached the limit, especially this close to the week’s final bell, he entered angina territory. “Who’s the seller here?”

“No word.”

Alex searched out a stray idler, pointing at the woman next to Eric. “You! Find out!”

The subordinate jammed knuckles, speed-dialing broker contacts.

Colin asked, “Shouldn’t you be busy?”

“My markets have gone to sleep,” Eric replied. He inspected his boards with idle satisfaction. “I’m a half mil up on the day and counting down to the first frosty glass. I’m gold.”

Alex yelled, “Give me something!”

The trader next to Eric replied, “I’ve got my number one broker in Canada on the horn. She says it’s definitely not Ottawa.”

If it was the Canadian central bank effecting a move, all was lost. The senior trader hesitated, then ordered, “Hit the bid.”

The junior trader’s hair was a rat’s nest. Her glasses slid along her sweat-slicked nose like a ski slope. “They’re offering another fifty! And I’ve got sixty more coming from nowhere!”

His voice belonging to an adrenaline junkie, Alex ordered, “Hit them all.”

There was a moment’s breathless wait, a hush made stronger by all the noise that had come before. All the traders sat and watched the screens. The young female trader stared at Alex, searching frantically for the assurance that Monday she’d still have a desk. Then Eric stabbed a finger at his central screen and shouted along with two others, “Canada’s falling!”

“How far?”

“Fifty, no, seventy-five.”

“Down ninety!”

“I’ve got a buyer at a hundred off!”

Alex collapsed into his seat. “Sell it back. Clear the decks.”

Colin glanced at his watch and reluctantly headed for the front door. If only he’d had the chance to share this scene with Lisa. He’d have explained how traders had no vested interest in the big picture. Traders could show no remorse for how their actions affected lives beyond this tightly enclosed world. Trading rooms didn’t have windows so the outside universe had no way of disturbing the flow. So far as this world was concerned, if outside events were positive, traders made their bucks. If people got offed and dreams were crushed along with national economies, traders made different bucks. So long as the money rolled and markets moved, up was down and down was up.

Only Lisa was gone and there was only himself to entertain. But since everyone else was chattering, why not join in, in his own quiet way.

Colin was back downstairs inside five minutes. The duration of his stay at the top of Everest was not the surprise factor here. Meetings with Hayek never lasted very long. But today Hayek’s secretary had immediately ushered him inside, without the customary wait to remind him of his lowly grub status. Hayek had then grilled him about the Havilland woman. For a man controlling multiple billions to spend this much time on a lowly peon was beyond bizarre.

The downstairs front lobby was Friday-evening calm. Across from the elevators, the receptionist sat behind her desk buffing her nails. The pair of sofa sets flanking the front windows were empty, as was the carpeted stairway leading up to the trading room balconies. That was another strange thing about recent developments-how every day spawned more gray-suited goons unable to speak decent English.

Beyond the security doors, the trading floor was in cleanup mode. As soon as Colin appeared, Eric and his boss emerged from a cluster of spot traders and walked over. “The man goes upstairs just another electro-nerd,” Eric taunted. “He comes down a stud muffin.”

Colin stared at the one trader he might class as a pal. Eric’s words made no more sense than Hayek’s. Discordant random acts were becoming one solid mass, tearing through everything in its path. “What are you on about now?”

“Power, my man. Access. Fresh data. The keys to our world. They’ve been slipped into your mangy paw and you don’t know enough to know you’ve been remade in the master’s image.”

“And you,” Colin replied, “are seriously twisted.”

“Absolutely. But it’s still true.” Eric leaned closer still. “The hoodoo beauty in Records was breathing hot over you, my man. Tell me you know who I mean.”

“Mandy,” Colin said. She was the talk of the entire Hayek team. A redheaded Popsicle with a polar glower. “That is nothing but myth and dangerous fabrication.”

Alex broke in, pointing toward the empty balcony. “Your confabs with the King wouldn’t have anything to do with the new realm up there, would it?”

“Not a hope.” Colin turned his gaze upward. The parapet was empty for a change, the workers gone for the weekend.

“Come on, you can tell your old pal,” Eric goaded him. “Word is, Hayek’s bringing in a load of fresh meat. Fitting them out with data he’s not sharing with the rest of us. You know what that means?”

“Yes.” Colin understood the looks now. They saw him as part of a new threat.

“It means we’re finished,” Alex said. From this range the senior trader had the pungent odor of an electric fire. “The first in the know takes home the bacon. The rest get the street.”

“I don’t have any idea what’s intended,” Colin replied. Both traders responded with tight-eyed distrust. “Look, I don’t know any more than you do.”

Alex said, “So what is it exactly that you discuss with the King?”