Russell Andrews - Hades

Justin's father was at the door when Justin opened it to welcome Roger. They shook hands warmly, gave each other a partial hug, then Justin had welcomed the two men into his living room.

"This is a surprise," he said to his father.

"I decided as long as you were paying for the transportation, I'd take advantage of it."

"My pleasure."

"I'm assuming this has to do with what happened to Ronald," Jonathan said.

Justin nodded. "And a lot more than that, too." He filled both men in on what had been happening. Not every detail, but anything he thought might be relevant, to take advantage of their financial expertise. Justin was not unhappy that his father was sitting in on the session. Jonathan Westwood had a clear and incisive way of looking at complicated problems. He'd helped Justin focus on potential solutions in the past. Jonathan was very good at weeding out extraneous information and zeroing in on the things that mattered.

Justin had reached the point in his tale where he could give the details of his visit to Ascension and tell them the various elements of Ben's computer thievery. Justin's father sat passively, taking it all in, but Justin could see Roger's eyes light up at the thought of poring over another firm's trading history.

When Justin had finished filling them in, Roger just said, "Give me everything and let me go through it."

"It's a lot," Justin said.

"I know it's a lot. So why don't you just leave me to it?"

"Don't you want us to do anything?" Justin asked.

"And what is it you think you can do?" Roger asked. And when Justin shrugged, Roger said, "This is going to be a lot of info to slog through, and a lot of it will be technical and boring. To you, not to me. So why don't the two of you get out of here? Come back in a few hours."

Jonathan looked at his son and raised his eyebrows, a look that said, He wants it, let him have it. The two Westwoods wished Roger Mallone luck, and headed out the door.

"Wait," Roger said just as the door was about to shut behind them. "You've gone beyond dial-up, right?"

"All the way to Wi-Fi."

Roger did his best Marv Albert impersonation: clenched his fist and hissed out a quiet, "Yessss."

"Go wild," Justin said. And this time he and his father actually got to leave.

Justin asked his father if they could walk awhile. He said he was glad that Roger had wanted to be alone. He had things he wanted to ask Jonathan, things he wanted to pick his brains about. Jonathan said he was more than happy to stroll. And he told his son to pick away.

"I had a strange reaction to the Ascension people and offices," Justin said as they began to walk in the direction of the center of the charming old whaling village.

"Strange how?" his father asked.

"I'm not naive," Justin went on. "Anything but. You know I don't expect-well, the best, let's say-out of people. But these guys were different."

"Different from whom?"

"Different from you. Different from the kind of moneyed people I know."

"Hedgehoggers? They are different. They live in a different world. At least it's different from the one I live in."

"Talk to me about it."

"Tell me what you want to know."

"Everything," Justin said. "Anything. It's the way I like to work. Learn things, get a feel for the overall picture. Then I'll see if something specific sticks. See what fits into the puzzle… or see what doesn't fit. Sometimes that's just as important." He noticed his father was staring at him. "What?"

"That's the way I work, too. When I'm looking at a company that wants a loan, that's what I do. I learn about their business, I learn about the people running their business, I listen to them talk, watch them when they talk."

"Same thing, really," Justin said. "It's all about getting it right."

Jonathan came back with a "hmmm," and then he picked up the pace of their walk and said, "One of the first hedge fund managers I ever met-maybe ten, twelve years ago-his arrogance was astonishing. I remember him coming to a meeting and basically he was saying that if I didn't get him what he wanted, he'd just buy me. Buy the big business, take the small thing he wanted out of it, then dismantle it, sell off the spare parts. I remember he looked at me and said he didn't care about the way things used to be done, he was the new breed, the new thinker. He said he was a man with no history. I remember he actually said he was like a phoenix, that he'd risen from the ashes as a brand-new person. He told me he was a completely self-made man."

"What did you say?"

"I told him he must also be a very religious man because it was clear that he worshiped his creator."

"I bet he didn't like that."

"He couldn't have cared less. Too self-absorbed, too absorbed with money and greed to care about anything that anyone else said or thought."

"What happened to him?"

"Made half a billion dollars in about two years. Lost a billion the next year. I think he's working for his father now, somewhere in the Midwest." Jonathan Westwood took a deep breath. Justin was startled to hear a faint wheeze. The first indication of frailty he'd ever had from his father. "There are about seven thousand hedge funds in the United States now. Ten years ago, there were maybe three, four hundred. They control a lot of money. A lot of money. Right now, probably over nine hundred billion dollars. And they control it quietly and secretly."

"Ascension manages about two billion bucks."

"Small to mid-range," Jonathan said. "There are a lot of funds in the two- to five-billion-dollar range. That's small in this universe. But you know what you can buy with five billion dollars?" Before Justin could answer, Jonathan said, "Anything you want." Then he said, "The people who run these funds, they personally make sixty, seventy, a hundred million dollars a year."

Justin whistled in amazement. "I knew about it, of course. But somehow I didn't quite realize…"

"Very few people do. You know how it works?"

"I know a little bit, but keep talking."

So Jonathan talked. And Justin listened as they strolled. He listened as Jonathan told him that hedge funds were basically started for rich people who wanted someone else to manage chunks of their money. The funds were open only to wealthy investors, and even now the minimum you could invest to get into a fund he'd heard about was twenty-five thousand dollars, and many wouldn't let you in for less than a million. Because they were basically serving rich people, they didn't have the same government restrictions and oversight that, say, a mutual fund would, when small investors have their money at risk. Hedge funds and hedgehoggers could move into almost any area that attracted them. They could trade equities, currencies, and debt. They could make loans, buy companies, and control companies and run them if they thought they had the know-how.

"And how do these guys, guys like Evan Harmon, make their money?" Justin asked.

"They take a two percent fee off the top from their investors. And twenty percent of the profit. Ascension has two billion dollars to invest? That means they're guaranteed an income of forty million dollars when they wake up on the first of the year. That's if they lose money. If they make a ten percent investment profit on two billion, the fund has a profit of two hundred million. Twenty percent of that brings in forty million more dollars to the firm. That's a nice little eighty-million-dollar income right there. And without crazy overhead. If push came to shove, one person could probably manage a hundred million-dollar funds from his garage as long as he had a computer and a few phone lines."

Jonathan said that the kind of money people made managing hedge funds over the past decade had changed the whole world. Investors lost sight of the products-not to mention the people and the companies-that were being invested in. The only things that began to matter were the profits-and then what mattered even more were all the toys that could be bought with those profits: the Warhols and Picassos, the Gulfstreams and Falcons, the horses and the horse farms, and the tens-of-thousands-square-foot mansions bought on miles of private beaches.