T. Bunn - Drummer in the Dark

In 1993, certain hedge funds and investment banks active in foreign exchange caused a run on the British pound. One hedge fund alone netted over three billion dollars profit from sixteen hours of trading.

In 1998, foreign exchange traders attacked the currencies of seven Asian nations. Five countries entered economic meltdown as a result. In a subsequent speech before the United Nations, the President of Malaysia condemned the world’s foreign exchange traders and the hedge fund operators. He called them “marauding pirates.”

In 2000, the new pan-European currency, the euro, came under attack. According to official reports, supporting the euro against foreign exchange traders has already cost American, European, and Japanese central banks and taxpayers over ninety billion dollars.

Recently the former director of Germany’s central bank said that a sustained assault on the American dollar was “only a matter of time.”

Because the international foreign exchange and currency derivatives markets are the least regulated of all major exchanges, their exact size cannot be stated. But the most widely accepted estimate places current market volume in excess of three trillion dollars.

Per day.

Liberty Park was a block-wide strip of palms and patchy grass stretching from the Melbourne hospital to the airport’s border. The park lay a mile from the high-rent district fronting the Intracoastal Waterway, and was bordered by Florida retirees who couldn’t afford beachfront prices. Local residents loathed the park. By day, the place was empty and baking. By night, the druggies and the pros took over. The noise, according to newspaper reports, was inhuman. In the two years since Wynn Bryant had sold his business, cashed in his corporate chips, and built his Merritt Island home fourteen miles north, he had successfully avoided giving the park a second glance.

This steamy March afternoon, Wynn watched his sister from the safety of his air-conditioned Audi. Sybel Bryant Wells, wife of Florida Governor Grant Wells, stood by tables laden with a meal for the homeless. A cluster of reporters hovered by the opposite side of the road, shooting pictures of how the governor’s wife celebrated her birthday.

Six years earlier, when his fledgling high-tech company had racked up its first major deal, Wynn had offered his sister her heart’s desire. He was twenty-eight at the time and flush with his first taste of success. The years leading up to that point had been fairly savage, and much of his early survival had been due to Sybel’s strength. This birthday offer had been Wynn’s attempt at payback. Sybel’s husband was then a lowly state legislator with lofty ambitions, and money had been tight. Whatever she wanted for her birthday, Wynn had offered to give her, that year and every March to come. If he could afford it, it was hers. Sybel’s response had shocked him speechless.

Wynn locked his car and crossed the street. His offer had reaped one voyage for each of Sybel’s birthdays, except the year his wife had become deathly ill. He had traveled to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Haiti. They had helped build an orphanage in a tiny Baja village, where San Diego was a myth lost beyond clouds of dust and diesel fumes. They also took a frostbitten journey to Canada’s Hudson Bay, where the alcoholism rate equaled winter unemployment-sixty-five percent of the adult population.

But these memories were not what now made the simple act of crossing the street a journey into battle. A month earlier, Sybel had called and asked the impossible. Wynn had silently hung up the phone. Click and goodbye. They had not spoken since. Last week Sybel had sent him a postcard saying simply, Liberty Park, Melbourne, Two pm. Sybel had a habit of growing very terse when things did not run her way.

Sybel was now talking with a slender priest in dark suit and clerical collar. Though she and Grant were Baptist, she maintained close relationships with many churches involved in homeless care and crisis centers. She was also a staunch supporter of a Catholic movement called Sant’Egidio and attended their mass or evening prayers whenever she could. This raised conservatives’ ire on both sides of the Christian divide, a fact that granted Wynn bitter satisfaction. Such ammunition was useful whenever she pressed him about his own lack of belief in anything beyond the galling vagaries of life.

Sybel glanced up at his approach, grabbed two empty garbage bags, and headed over. “Give me a hand, will you?”

He kept his arms at his sides. “I’m not going back to Cairo.”

“Take the bag, Wynn.”

“I’m never going back. You of all people should have known not to ask.”

“Those reporters are watching.” She thrust the bag into his hand. “And that’s not why I asked you here today.”

He fell into step beside her. “It was still wrong. You should never have brought it up.”

Sybel approached a trio of bearded men sprawled beneath a Florida oak. Their hands were gnarled as the tree’s branches, their faces stained by life on the road. “Did you gentlemen get enough to eat?”

Wynn’s ear caught the difference then. Usually Sybel came alive at such times. Sybel had a special way with those who had lost their own voice. Normally she could melt all within range, draw smiles from people hard as upright stones. Even the young girls, turned old by the users and the wolves, would sometimes emerge from their shells and speak with her, revealing traces of their blinding pain. Sybel’s presence was that compelling, her music that soft.

But not today.

Sybel jammed more soiled paper plates into her bag and walked on. Between groups, Wynn asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Everything.”

Sybel shared Wynn’s dark good looks, and people usually assumed they were far closer in age than the eleven years actually separating them. Sybel had a long neck and a river of dark hair, braided now into a rope thick as Wynn’s wrist. But where his eyes were clouded gray, Sybel’s were jet black and as direct as her opinions. Normally she was poised, determined, and ferociously independent. Her smiles were seldom bestowed and always genuine. This tight worry was new and a matter of concern.

“Is it Grant?” When she responded by punching more trash into her bag, he asked, “What is it this time?”

“Maybe it comes with age. Maybe he doesn’t have the energy to hold onto the lies any more.” She glanced blindly around the sunlit park. “No, not lies. Just the things that don’t matter as much as he always pretended.”

“Why don’t you-”

“Our meeting today isn’t about me and Grant.” Sybel drew him behind a cluster of palms, blocking them from the feeding station’s curious eyes. “It’s about you.”

“I’m doing just fine, Sybel.”

“You’re wasting your life. You’re worse off than these tramps.” She rattled the bag like a plastic whip. At such times, Sybel defined impatience. “For two years you’ve been living life parked in a rest area. Your biggest concern is teaching your latest fling how to use the espresso machine.”

“I’m not one of your kids, Sybel.” His niece attended seminary in Charleston. His nephew, a gangling teenage baseball fanatic, saw the governor’s mansion as his own personal date-pulling machine. Sybel had never had much luck with her men.