F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

Jack’s turn to stare. “Okay. Could you try that in English? I never learned Wookie.”

Harris said, “Look: If you buy a put on United Airlines stock and the price suddenly drops, you pocket the difference between the higher price of the put and lower price of the stock. Puts are sold in blocks of a hundred. Puts for a thousand shares for a stock selling at a hundred bucks a share will net you twenty-five grand if the share price drops to seventy-five.”

Another moment of dead silence as that sank in. Jack didn’t like the feeling seeping through him. The jets hijacked on 9/11 had belonged to American and United Airlines. That meant . . .

“So this Cardoza was betting that the stocks of those two airlines would drop?”

“You got it. Plus Morgan Stanley Dean Witter as well.”

“Why them?”

“They occupied twenty-two floors of the North Tower.”

“Holy shit . . .” Jack leaned back. “He knew.”

“Sure looks that way.”

The waiter arrived with their drinks and asked if they were ready to order their meals. Nobody wanted anything, and that didn’t go over too well.

“If you’ll be sitting in the dining area,” he said with a stern look, “you’ll be ordering food.”

Well, they needed the privacy—especially with the bombshells Harris was dropping.

But were they private? The choice of the pub had been as random as Jack could imagine. No one was in earshot. He’d been keeping an eye on the bar area. No one there had shown any interest in them, but bars held countless reflective surfaces. Someone could be scoping them out in a mirrored beer sign. Jack had done it plenty of times himself. But even if they were, they couldn’t hear—that was the important thing.

To satisfy the food requirement, they each ordered an appetizer. Jack chose the fried calamari. This being an Irish pub, he figured he’d be dealing with the equivalent of breaded rubber bands, but nobody said he had to eat it. The waiter departed reasonably happy.

When they were alone again, Harris pulled the manila folder from his backpack and shuffled through the papers.

“My guy wasn’t alone.” He peered at a sheet. “Here. In the week before the Towers attack there was no bad news about air travel in general and no bad news about either American or United in particular. Both were trading in the low thirties. Yet on September sixth and seventh, the CBO—”

“The what?”

“The Chicago Board Options Exchange—it handles zillions of puts and calls. It recorded over forty-seven hundred puts on United and less than four hundred calls those days. The volume on the sixth, the Thursday before the attack, was two hundred and eighty-five times the average—an incomprehensible increase.”

“All in one account?”

“No. In numerous accounts. The people who knew what was coming were moving to cash in.”

Jack shook his head. “You’ve got to be making this up.”

“I’m not. Same thing happened to American Airlines on the tenth, the day before the attack—over forty-five hundred puts. Way, way, way above average. Same with Morgan Stanley: twenty-five times the usual daily average in puts. The stock markets were closed the rest of the week after the attack, but when they reopened on the seventeenth, United dropped forty-three percent and American dropped forty. Morgan Stanley dropped too. The result: Anyone who held puts on those stocks cleaned up.”

“But everything dropped,” Eddie said. “The whole market tanked. Someone could have simply shorted the indexes and cleaned up.”

“Not to the extent our boy did. Relatively, the Dow dropped a mere fraction of what United, American, and Morgan Stanley suffered.”

The conversation was making Jack gladder than ever that he kept his money in gold.

Harris said, “At that time, a one-hundred-share put on United was selling for around ninety bucks. He bought a hundred of them for nine grand.”

“Meaning he had options on ten thousand shares,” Eddie said. “How much did United drop?”

“Thirteen bucks.”

Eddie whistled. “He made a hundred and thirty thousand on that one deal alone.”

Harris nodded. “Fifteen hundred percent profit. But that’s not all. Our boy also purchased calls—meaning he expected the stock price to rise—on Raytheon.”

Jack looked at them. “Which is . . . ?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Eddie said. “A defense contractor. They make Tomahawk missiles.” He sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “I can guess what happened to Raytheon when the market reopened.”

Harris was nodding. “Big jump—thirty-seven percent.”

Jack was finding all this . . . incredible. Literally.

“Is this for real? I mean—don’t take offense—but we have only your word that any of this went on, and we don’t know you.”

Harris shrugged. “I know it’s a lot to swallow, but it’s all verifiable. Look it up yourself. The put-call ratios are a matter of public record.”

Well, if so, that raised an obvious question . . .

“Hold on a sec. If this kind of bump in activity was recorded, how come no one else noticed?”

“Believe me, plenty of people have noticed. The SEC even launched an investigation—or at least said it did.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Have you heard of any arrests?”

“No, but then I don’t pay much attention to—”

“I do,” Harris said. “I pay a lot of attention. And not a single person has been arrested.”

“But how do they explain—?”

Harris shrugged. “They don’t. It’s been dropped.”

“Sounds like How to Spark a Conspiracy Theory one-oh-one.”

“For sure. And the conspiracy theory is bolstered by the fact that two and a half million dollars’ worth of puts remain uncollected.”

Eddie leaned forward. “Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t think they expected the markets to close so quickly. They probably planned to make a quick transaction the next day, before anyone made the connection between the whacked-out put-call ratios and the attacks, and disappear. But the markets stayed closed all week and after that they didn’t dare collect.”

“What about your boy?” Jack said.

“With his foreign account, he managed to execute the options and get away with it.”

“I gather then from what you said to Weezy that you’ve been looking for this Cardoza and you’ve found him.”

“Well, yes, and no. There is no Emilio Cardoza—at least, the Emilio Cardoza who opened the account doesn’t exist.”

“Then you haven’t found him.”

Harris smiled. “Oh, but I have. Louise assumed it was a false identity and asked me to look into it. She bought me tickets to Basel and Madrid and paid all my expenses. With the help of a bunch of euros—also supplied by Louise—I managed to get my hands on a security photo of Cardoza.”

Jack spread his hands. “So he does exist.”

“Only on paper. I speak decent Spanish and in Spain I showed his photo around and learned that his real name is Bashar Sheikh, a Pakistani whose last known residence was just outside Tarragona, Spain.”

Jack’s bullshitometer was redlining. Pass a few euros in Switzerland and get a photo . . . show that photo around in Spain and get a real name. All Jack knew about international intrigue was what he’d read in novels, but whatever the reality was, it couldn’t be that easy. And Harris was no George Smiley.

Eddie looked equally baffled. “If this is supposed to mean something, it doesn’t.”

Harris said, “I don’t know what it means either. Sheikh hasn’t been seen or heard from since the spring of ’04. I’ve never heard of the man, but he immediately looked familiar. I’ve seen his face before, but I can’t place him. But I knew Louise would recognize him because—”