Colin Harrison - Afterburn

"FCC."

"Foreign Correspondents' Club?"

"Right away."

It was the only place open at night in Hong Kong where he knew he could get access to a Bloomberg box-that magical electronic screen that displayed every stock and bond price in every market around the globe. He pulled out his cell phone and called his broker in London. He kept his trading account there so that he could straddle the Asian, European, and American markets.

"Jane, this is Charlie Ravich," he said when she answered. "I want to set up a huge put play. Drop everything."

"This is not like you."

"This is not like anything. Sell all my Microsoft now at the market price, sell all the Ford, the Merck, all the Lucent, all the Wal-Mart and Deutsche Telekom. Market orders all of them. Please, right now, before London closes."

"All right. Now, for the tape, you are requesting we sell eight thousand shares of-"

"Yes, yes, I agree," he blurted, for the purposes of the automatic recording device. "Just hurry."

Jane was off for a moment, getting another broker to carry out the orders. "Zoom-de-doom," she said when she returned. "Let it rip."

"This is going to add up to about one-point-oh-seven million," he said. "I'm buying puts on Gaming Technologies, the gambling company. It's American but trades in London."

"Yes." Now her voice held interest. " Yes."

"How many puts of GT can I buy with that?"

She was shouting orders to her clerks. "Wait…" she said. "Yes? Very good. I have your account on my screen. All those stocks are going to cash. We're filling those at the market, waiting for the-yes. The sells are showing up…" He heard keys clicking. "We have… one million seventy thousand, U.S., plus change. Now then, Gaming Technologies is selling at sixty-six even a share-"

"Is the price dropping?"

"No, no, it's up an eighth last trade, two minutes ago, in fact."

"How many puts can I buy with one-point-oh-seven?"

"Oh, I would say a huge number, Charlie."

"How many?"

"About… one-point-six million shares."

"That's huge, all right." A put was the option to sell a stock at a certain price by a certain time. Because the cost of each put was a fraction of the share price, a small amount of money could leverage a huge sum.

"You want to protect that bet?" Jane asked.

"No. The stock is going down."

"If you say so."

"Buy the puts, Jane."

"I am, Charlie, please. The price is stable. Yes, take this one

…" she was saying to a clerk. "Give me puts on GT at market, immediately. Yes. Hang on, Charlie. One-point-six million at the money. Yes. At the money. I'm giving my authorization."

The line was silent a moment. He had just spent more than a million dollars on the right to sell 1.6 million shares of GT at $66 a share.

"You sure, Charlie?"

"This is a bullet to the moon, Jane."

"Biggest bet of your life, Charlie?"

"Oh, Jane, not even close."

Outside his cab a silky red Rolls glided past, its license plate indicating it was owned by an officer of the People's Liberation Army. Hong Kong was like that now, the PLA-vulgar and dangerous and clever-getting rich, forcing corruption through the pipes. "Got it?" he asked.

"Not quite. You going to tell me the play, Charlie?"

"When it goes through, Jane."

"We'll get the order back in a minute or two."

Die on the shitter, Charlie thought. Could happen to anyone. Happened to Elvis Presley, matter of fact.

"Charlie?"

"Yes."

"We have your puts. One-point-six million, GT, at the price of sixty-six." He heard the keys clicking. " Now tell me?" Jane pleaded.

"I will," Charlie said. "Just give me the verbal confirmation for the tape."

While she repeated the price and the volume of the order, he looked out the window to see how close the taxi was to the FCC. He'd first visited the club while on leave in 1970, when it was full of drunken television and newspaper journalists, CIA people, Army intelligence, retired British admirals who had gone native and were no longer welcome in their own clubs, crazy Texans provisioning the war, and just about every other expat lonesome for conversation; since then, the rest of Hong Kong had been built up and torn down and built up all over again, but the FCC still stood, tucked away on a side street.

"I just want to get my times right," Charlie told Jane when she was done. "It's now a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday in Hong Kong. What time are you in London?"

"Just after 2:00 p.m."

"London markets are open about an hour more?"

"Yes," Jane said.

"New York starts trading in half an hour."

"Yes."

"I'll be able to watch the market from here, Jane."

"Yes."

"But I need you to stay in your office and handle New York for me."

She sighed. "I'm due to pick up my son from school."

"Need a car, a new car?"

"Everybody needs a new car."

"Just stay there a few more hours, Jane. You can pick out a Mercedes tomorrow morning and charge it to my account."

"You're a charmer, Charlie."

"I'm serious. Charge my account."

"Okay, will you please tell me?"

Of course he would, not only so that she could score a bit of the action herself, but because he needed to get the news moving. "Sir Henry Lai just died. Maybe fifteen minutes ago."

"Sir Henry Lai…"

"The Macao gambling billionaire who was in deep talks with GT-"

"Yes! Yes!" Jane cried. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"It's not just a rumor?"

"Jane. This is Charlie you're talking to."

"How do you know?"

"Jane, you don't trust old Charlie Ravich?"

"Please, Charlie, there's still time for me to make a play here!"

"I saw it with my own-"

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"— eyes, Jane. Right there in front of me."

"It's dropping! Oh! Down to sixty-four," she cried miserably. "There it goes! There go ninety thousand shares! Somebody else got the word out! Sixty-three and a-Charlie, oh Jesus, you beat it by maybe a minute."

He told her he'd call again shortly and stepped out of the cab, careful with his back, and walked into the club, a place so informal that the clerk just gave him a nod; people strode in all day long to have drinks in the main bar, a square room with many of the famous black-and-white AP and UPI photos of Asia: Mao in Beijing, the naked little Vietnamese girl running toward the camera, her village napalmed behind her, the sitting Buddhist monk burning himself to death in protest, Nixon at the Great Wall. Inside sat several dozen men and women drinking and smoking, many of them American and British journalists, others small-time local businessmen who long ago had slid into alcoholism, burned out, boiled over, or given up.

He ordered a whiskey and sat down in front of the Bloomberg box, fiddling with it until he found the correct menu for real-time London equities. He was up millions and the New York Stock Exchange had not even opened yet. What do you know about war, Mr. Ravich? Please, tell me. I am curious. Ha! The big American shareholders of GT, or, more particularly, their analysts and advisers and market watchers, most of them punks in their thirties, were still tying their shoes and kissing the mirror and reading The New York Times and soon-very soon! — they'd be buying coffee at the Korean deli and saying hello to the receptionist at the front desk and sitting down at their screens. Minutes away! When they found out that Sir Henry Lai had collapsed and died in the China Club in Hong Kong at 8:45 p.m. Hong Kong time, they would assume, Charlie hoped, that because Lai ran an Asian-style, family-owned corporation, and because as its patriarch he dominated its governance, any possible deal with GT was off, indefinitely. They would then reconsider the price of GT, still absurdly stratospheric even after its ride down in London, and they would dump it fast.