62

ED GREY HAD missed the start of the White House press conference, caught up on the phone with a client who was trying to get his money out of Red River. Grey had been forced to shut down redemptions from the fund and was spending half his days cajoling clients who swore they would take out every last cent of their investments the minute redemptions opened again. They might do it, they might not. When the dust settled they might realize they would be hard put to find another fund manager who hadn’t done the same thing. Either way he had no choice but to stop them now.

When he finally managed to get off the phone and come out into the trading room, the president was talking about the importance of cooperation with China. All eyes in the room were on a screen showing the press conference. The only sound was the president’s voice.

The trading room wasn’t the same as it had been before the crisis. Somehow it was a sadder, smaller place. A couple of faces were missing, people who had gone home for Christmas and decided they didn’t want to come back. There would be more, Ed knew. He could see four or five who would drop away over the next few weeks. You could tell by their faces, by the look in their eyes. Something had gone. The fire was extinguished.

Boris Malevsky was going to be one of them. He was listless, mechanical. Fidelian had burned him up.

Grey turned his attention back to the screen. The president made his appeal to Zhang to join him in a summit to solve the economic crisis, then said he had one more announcement to make.

Grey folded his arms as the president continued speaking. It was a bold step, he thought, to call for a summit. Or a desperate one.

The president didn’t look desperate, thought Grey, watching him carefully. What was Knowles expecting Zhang to say to the idea of a summit? He must have had an expectation of Zhang’s response to make that suggestion. More than just an expectation.

On the screen, a tall woman in a blue pant suit was coming forward from the group of officials who had been standing behind the president.

Grey had been momentarily lost in his thoughts. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘Marion Ellman,’ replied one of the portfolio managers. ‘She’s the UN ambassador. Knowles just said he’s naming her as his nominee to be the new secretary of state.’

The president shook her hand and stepped away from the lectern. Ed Grey listened as she began to speak.

‘Mr President, I’d like to thank you for this great honor. Before I say anything else, I’d like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Bob Livingstone. Bob was a truly …’

Grey grunted. One secretary of state was bound to be much like another. The president’s choice was going to make no difference to his life.

There were more important things for him to think about. He went back to his office.

Tony Evangelou followed him in.

‘Interesting, huh?’ said Grey.

Evangelou nodded. He took a seat.

Grey pulled up some market indices on a screen. There was a slight bounce going on.

‘You think this might be the start of something?’ said Evangelou.

‘You want to be careful of wishful thinking in these situations.’

‘I know. Still, if they get something together …’

Grey nodded. The response from the Chinese president would be the thing that really moved the market. If he was negative – if he was even only lukewarm – the market would be right back where it had started. If he was positive, there’d be a kick.

‘Ed, do you think we really started it?’

It was a question Ed Grey had been asking himself for weeks. Was he a pawn or was he a player? The idea that this whole crisis was the result of his decision to short Fidelian was somehow unbelievable and yet there was nothing to say that it was impossible. If he hadn’t started shorting Fidelian, would the market have stumped up the twenty-three billion when Fidelian came looking for cash? Maybe it would have. Was it conceivable that one fund, with one well-timed set of trades, had triggered a series of events that had sent the world’s markets from New York to Tokyo plunging in panic? The possibility was both terrifying and awe-inspiring. Ed Grey didn’t know if he even wanted it to be true. Part of him did for the sheer rush of being able to boast – or even merely to know – that he was the man who had moved the markets. Part of him feared it for the vulnerability it revealed of how the markets could be moved by the right set of trades at the right psychological moment.

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Who cares, right?’

None of that really mattered. It was twelve weeks since Ed Grey had made the decision to short the stock of Fidelian Bank, and in that twelve weeks he had seen the value of Red River fall by twenty-four billion. The fund would have collapsed entirely under the margin calls of the banks if the accounting rules hadn’t been suspended. All that mattered to him now was what position the fund was going to be in when the accounting rules were reimposed, and how he was going to make that twenty-four billion dollars back. And then some.

You could lose money fast. But get in ahead of the market, make the right set of bets, and you could make it back again just as fast.

If the Chinese president said yes to Knowles’ suggestion, bond prices were going to rocket. Equities too.

Ed Grey thought about what Knowles had said. Whatever the president claimed, he couldn’t possibly make a public proposal for a summit without knowing that Zhang would agree. There must have been a deal. In Ed Grey’s mind, an idea rapidly formed of what that deal looked like. Zhang must have agreed to get the Sudanese to hand over the helicopter pilots in return for having Knowles ask him to a summit. It made perfect sense. A deal like that would play to the constant Chinese gripe that they didn’t have enough say in international financial affairs.

And whatever Knowles said, however tentatively he presented it, neither man, thought Grey, would go to a summit if there wasn’t at least the outline of an agreement already worked out. That wasn’t how politics worked.

Tony Evangelou was thinking exactly the same thing.

As was every trader in every DIV, bank and brokerage around the world.

Evangelou raised an eyebrow questioningly.

‘We still got that cash?’ asked Grey.

Evangelou nodded. Red River had close to a billion in cash from assets they had liquidated in the last hours before the mark-to-market rules were suspended. The money had been destined for their banks to meet margin calls, but with the suspension of the rules, the margin calls had been suspended as well.

Evangelou was still watching him.

Ed Grey looked at the screen for a moment. Then he turned back to Tony Evangelou.

For the first time in weeks, he had a smile on his face. He was about to say something he had thought, in the darkest of the dark days in the past few weeks, that he might never say again.

‘Let’s get in there and buy.’