T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

“No.”

There it was. Duct-taped to the back of his server. Wired in and out between his dedicated lines. A second ghost feed. A tracer. Colin pried it free, reattached the wires as they should have been, and slid out.

The sight froze all motion. “Is that what I think it is?”

Someone else asked, “Why would anybody want to bug their own security guy’s system?”

Colin rose to his feet, brushing futilely at the dirt. “I’ve got to see Alex.”

Colin’s cubicle hummed with a power all its own. He had maneuvered for an ergonomic chair like the senior traders, nylon strung tight as a pro’s racket, balancing every part of his body and offering flow-through ventilation. His desk held six monitors, two more than the average trader, and his were all twenty-one inch Fujitsu LCDs. State of the art, five thousand dollars a pop. Not to mention his two independent servers. Six dedicated lines, three in, three out. It was the nerd’s equivalent of strapping into the saddle of an F-16. Clicking in, blasting off. Locked and loaded.

The gabardine menace’s invasion left Colin seriously assaulted.

He sat as Alex led in five other senior traders, a third of those managing the Hayek floor. All of them were tense and impatient over being dragged away from the end of trading. He watched them do a quick sweep of his gear. A couple of them whistled appreciatively.

Alex instructed, “Show them what you found.”

Colin handed him the coupling, explained, “It’s a high-speed drone, flashing a duplicate signal of every incoming and outgoing message I send over the wires. A wiretap for computer transmissions.”

“Now show him the others.”

Another trader barked, “He found more?”

“Two on the trading floor’s outgoing feeder lines,” Alex confirmed.

They handled the bugs with cold fury. Colin did not know them well. Senior traders occupied a universe all their own. They were blooded gunslingers with countless notches in their belts, carrying life and death and corporate profit in both fists. Over twenty-eight billion dollars in daily limits were represented here. A total personal net worth of forty, maybe fifty million dollars. But as they inspected the bugs, Colin saw just five men and one woman in rumpled sweat-smeared clothes, strung out from another day in the electronic trenches.

The lone woman was a recent import from New York. “This is a normal part of the Florida game plan?”

“Not on my turf.” Alex bore two white spots over the bones beside each eye. “I’ve done some checking. Any of you catch the guy this morning wearing a rose bush in his hair?”

“Hard to miss,” the woman replied.

“Nice touch, by the way,” the senior bonds trader offered Colin. “Your work?”

“It was a ficus tree,” Colin replied. “But yes, thanks.”

“Whatever.” Alex’s hands trembled slightly, perhaps from anger, perhaps mere tremors from too many days balanced on the razor’s edge. “His name is Brant Anker. Formerly of San Francisco. B of A. Number two Forex spots desk. He was shed when they closed the SF trading ops. Him and a hundred and sixty others.”

The news silenced the room. The bond trader demanded, “So how many landed here?”

“Far as I can tell,” Alex replied, “something like two dozen.”

“You mind telling me why Hayek would graft on an independent Forex arm?”

“Only two reasons that I can come up with, both of them bad. One, he’s going to let me and my team go.”

“That’s a no-brainer.” This from the head of their derivatives arm. “You’re outperforming the entire floor.”

“I’ve got no time for the Unabomber. Maybe Hayek wants somebody who’s more of a team player.” Alex’s eyes were bleak. Ancient fatigue gripped his face and pulled it back until the edges rippled with the strain.

“So what’s the other option?”

“He’s setting them up to move a big parcel of new money.”

“Using restricted data?”

“That’s my worst-case.”

The woman’s face was lined by an overdose of reality. “Looks like it’s time to dust off the old résumé.”

“I don’t buy in.” This from the head of the corporate desk. “Why plant these guys right under our nose if they’re using confidential info? Why not stick them where we’d never know? Hayek’s got no reason not to put another arm in Luxembourg, hide it from all but the elves.”

“This afternoon Hayek came in from Miami, stayed maybe five minutes, and took off again.” Alex went on, “My thinking is, tomorrow morning we hit Hayek all together. The module, the Gucci warrior sneaking around, the goons in gray, the new traders dancing on our heads, the lack of answers, everything.”

The new woman rose wearily to her feet. “Here I was thinking my kids would get to know a world of schools without guns and chain-link fences and guard dogs. I should have known it was too good to last.”

“An hour before the opening bell,” Alex told the group. To Colin, “You with us?”

Wednesday

Wynn’s flight from Rome to Cairo took less than three hours. Everything about the airport and the highway into town was newer than his memories. Yet even when the new gave way to the old, when street corners became filled with men in djellabas smoking and talking, when the horns blared and the potholes bounced his taxi, still he remained untouched. Which was very good.

Sybel had booked them into the Inter-Continental, one of the new downtown hotels. The balcony of his ninth-floor suite held sweeping views of Cairo and the Nile. Traffic flowed along the Corniche, the road fronting the riverbank. The Nile flickered green and cool. As he stood on his balcony and watched the river cruisers, the first recollection struck. It came neither with sight nor sound, but smell. Wynn tasted a fragrance of river water, woodsmoke, spices, and diesel fumes. In the distance, beyond the Nile and the dusty day, he thought he heard a boy’s laughter. It was enough to press him back inside.

Wynn swept the curtains shut, closing out the hated place. He stretched out on the bed but did not sleep. He had dozed the entire flight down, and now was trapped in his own wakeful lair. He was still awake when the muezzin called the faithful to late-morning prayers. The cry rose from everywhere, including Wynn’s own mind.

Their houseboy, Ali, had taught him to mimic the muezzin’s call and the intonations, then laughed delightedly when his piping voice had imitated the long-drawn-out syllables. Wynn had practiced with Ali for days. His debut performance had been at his parents’ weekly Saturday dinner, a gathering for as many as thirty guests. On those nights the table stretched through the parlor’s double doors and extended onto the apartment balcony. Wynn had stood there and done his chant and made many of the guests laugh. All of them applauded afterward, all save his parents.

The next day his father had shown him a book, the most beautiful book Wynn had ever seen. Each page was illustrated with designs of gold and violet and blue. “This is the most valuable thing I own,” his father told him. “Your mother gave it to me for our first anniversary in Cairo. We keep it in the ebony box your mother has ordered you never to touch. It is more than three hundred years old.”

Wynn’s finger had reached out to trace a line midway down the right-hand page, one set aside from the other writing by thin gold lines. The writing itself was gold as well, and shone ruddy and yellow in the daylight.

“This entire book was written by hand. This first line, what you now touch, is the same for each chapter, or Sura . It is part of the muezzin’s prayer, what you chanted. You see how this last word is drawn out long, just like the muezzin’s call? The scribe writes this prayer, and then draws this word so very long, you see? Why? Because this is the word Allah . Just as the muezzin draws out the word until his mind is focused, the scribe does this as a prayer. He asks help to clear his mind. He is about to copy a chapter of what for him is the holy book. His mind must be clear and silent and thinking of nothing save Allah.”