Colin Harrison: Afterburn

Maybe it would go that way. He ordered another drink, then called Jane.

"GT is down almost five points," she told him. "New York is about to open."

"But I don't see panic yet. Where's the volume selling?"

"You're not going to see it here, not with New York opening. People may think New York will buy before they know the news. I'll be sitting right here."

"Excellent, Jane. Thank you."

"No, thank you."

"Oh?"

"I got in with my own account at sixty-four and out at sixty-one, so I made a nice sum this afternoon, Charlie."

"Why didn't you hold?" he asked. "I think it's going down further."

"Maybe I don't have your guts."

"Jane. Jane. You think old man Charlie is going over the edge-I can hear it in your voice."

"Not at all. Call me when you're ready to close out the play."

He hung up, looked into the screen. The real-time price of GT was hovering at fifty-nine dollars a share. No notice had moved over the information services yet. Not Bloomberg, not Reuters.

He went back to the bar, pushed his way past a couple of journalists.

"Another?" the bartender asked, perhaps noticing the scar on Charlie's hand.

"Yes, sir. A double," he answered loudly. "I just got very bad news."

"Sorry to hear that." The bartender did not look up.

"Yes." Charlie nodded solemnly. "Sir Henry Lai died tonight, massive heart attack at the China Club. A terrible thing." He slid one hundred Hong Kong dollars across the bar. Several of the journalists peered at him.

"Pardon me," asked one, a tall Englishman with a riot of red hair. "Did I hear you say Sir Henry Lai has died?"

Charlie nodded. "Not an hour ago. Terrible thing to witness. I just happened to be standing there, at the China Club." He tasted his drink. "Please excuse me."

He returned to the Bloomberg screen. The Englishman, he noticed, had slipped away to a pay phone in the corner. The New York Stock Exchange, casino to the world, had been open a minute. He waited. Three, four, five minutes. And then, finally, came what he'd been waiting for, Sir Henry Lai's epitaph: GT's price began shrinking as its volume exploded-half a million shares, price fifty-eight, fifty-six, two million shares, fifty-five and a half. He watched. Four million shares now. The stock would bottom and bounce. He'd wait until the volume slowed. At fifty-five and a quarter he pulled his phone out of his pocket, called Jane, and executed the option to sell at sixty-six. At fifty-five and seven-eighths he bought the same number of shares he'd optioned, for a profit of a bit more than ten dollars a share. Major money. Sixteen million before taxes. Big money. Real money. Elvis money.

The whiskey was finding its way around his brain, and now he was prepared to say that soon he would be drunk.

It was almost eleven when he arrived back at his hotel, which loomed brightly above him, a tinkle of music and voices floating out into the gauzy fog from the open-air swimming pool on the fourteenth floor. The Sikh doorman, a vestige from the days of the British Empire, nodded a greeting. Inside the immense lobby a piano player pushed along a little tune that made Charlie feel mournful, and he sat down in one of the deep chairs that faced the harbor. So much ship traffic, hundreds of barges and junks and freighters and, farther out, the supertankers. To the east sprawled the new airport-they had filled in the ocean there, hiring half of all the world's deep-water dredging equipment to do it. History in all this. He was looking at ships moving across the dark waters, but he might as well be looking at the twenty-first century itself, looking at his own countrymen who could not find factory jobs. The poor fucks had no idea what was coming at them, not a clue. China was a juggernaut, an immense, seething mass. It was building aircraft carriers, it was buying Taiwan. It shrugged off turmoil in Western stock markets. Currency fluctuations, inflation, deflation, volatility-none of these things compared to the fact that China had eight hundred and fifty million people under the age of thirty-five. They wanted everything Americans now took for granted, including the right to piss on the shoes of any other country in the world. The Chinese could actually get things done, too; they were rewiring with fiber-optic cable, they were tearing down Shanghai, a city of fourteen million, and rebuilding it from scratch. The central government had committed a trillion dollars to the effort, bulldozing any neighborhood deemed standing in the way of progress. If you didn't like it, and announced as much, the Chinese tied you spread-eagle to a door for a month or so. With a hole to shit through. They knew America didn't care-not really. There was too much money to be made-he could see that right now, the boats on their way north, the slide of time.

But ha! There might be some consolation after all! He pushed back in the seat, slipped on his half-frame glasses, and did the math on a hotel napkin. After commissions and taxes, his evening's activities had netted him close to eight million dollars-a sum grotesque not so much for its size but for the speed and ease with which he had seized it-two phone calls! — and, most of all, for its mockery of human toil. Well, it was a grotesque world now. He'd done nothing but understand what the theorists called a market inefficiency and what everyone else knew as inside information. If he was a ghoul, wrenching dollars from Sir Henry Lai's vomit-filled mouth, then at least the money would go to good use. He'd put all of it in a bypass trust for Julia's child. The funds could pay for clothes and school and pediatrician's bills and whatever else. It could pay for a life. He remembered his father buying used car tires from the garage of the Minnesota Highway Patrol for a dollar-fifty. No such thing as steel-belted radials in 1956. Charlie-boy, I'm going to teach you how to fix a broken fan belt. Kinda useful thing to know. See, you could be on some road somewhere and… He'd shown his father an F-105 in 1967, told him that NASA would make it to the moon in a couple of years. His father had never believed it. He'd told his father that he'd carried a small nuclear warhead in test flights in 1970. His father had never believed that, either. You cross borders of time, and if people don't come with you, you lose them and they you. Now it was an age when a fifty-eight-year-old American executive could net eight million bucks by watching a man choke to death. His father would never have understood it, and he suspected that Ellie couldn't, either. Not really. There was something in her head lately. She was going some other direction. Maybe it was because of Julia, but maybe not. She was anxious and irritable these days, jabbering at him about retirement communities, complaining that he traveled too much. She seemed distracted, too. She bought expensive vegetables she let rot in the refrigerator, she kept changing her hair color, she took Charlie's blood-pressure pills by mistake, she left the phone off the hook. He wanted to be patient with her but could not. She drove him nuts.

He sat in the hotel lobby for an hour more, reading every article in the International Herald Tribune and eating a piece of chocolate cake. He wondered how Mr. Ming knew about the quad-port transformer. The factory Ming was financing would initially manufacture Teknetrix's existing line of datacom switches, not the Q4. It was possible, of course, that one of the company's salesmen had bragged about the Q4, or the tech research people had let slip some information at one of the industry conferences. His main competitor, Manila Telecom, might know of the research on the product-Charlie's company certainly knew of theirs.

He wouldn't worry the question now. Julia was more important. He checked his watch and finally, at midnight, decided not to wait for her call and pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed her Manhattan office.