The Last Trade Read Online Free

friend of a hacker friend. Two days ago, while tracking activity involving the securities in the Rising Fund at the behest of Drew Havens, he came upon a number sequence dispatched by a server in Berlin that eventually took him behind the firewall at Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong. And now today, a massive series of trades of American securities is going down at Hang Seng that is taking the exact opposite short positions to the Rising Fund’s longs on the same stocks. As he watches it unfold, he’s even able to find out the name of the Hang Seng broker executing them: Patrick Lau.
    His next click, prompted by the number sequence out of Berlin, takes him to another series of trades, all shorts, just like in Hong Kong, commencing out of Dubai and, curiously, also the mirror opposite of positions held by The Rising. As he leans closer, his screen blinks on and off. When it comes back up, the Dubai page is gone and a Spyware warning briefly flashes in the upper left part of the screen. Wired or not, he knows that this isn’t a hallucination and that it’s entirely possible that someone out there might be tracking him, tracking them.
    He grabs a red flash drive on the right side of the desk and plugs it into port. Because he won’t look into any of this on the office computers, everything he has is on this big, clunky desktop. In case he has to run, he wants to have some kind of backup, and to at least have a copy to give to Havens.
    While the files are loading, he switches back to Bloomberg and keeps an eye on the Berlin numbers and tries to formulate a model or theory that might make sense of them. What do these transactions have to do with the Rising Fund, and who in Berlin is behind them?
    He’s still staring at the screen when a new message appears at the bottom of the Berlin page. He reads it, then does a search. After a few moments the software generates two slightly different variations on a response, both of which roughly translate to
    Â 
    kill Patrick Lau

3
    New York City
    H avens puts his phone back in his pocket as Salvado stands. Salvado straightens his tie and shouts over the house music, over the bluster of the men, the cackles of the play-for-pay women, and the primal roar of the dance floor below, “A toast!” He raises his just-filled flute of Cristal, and the rest of the table joins him, including the young, blond, Russian “model” who’s been pawing at him since she was brought to the table. Watching the model, Havens can’t help but think of Salvado’s soon-to-be-ex-wife and kids and the speech that Salvado gave to him when he first started at The Rising, about the firm’s unwavering commitment to fidelity and loyalty, to work and family.
    â€œA toast to the long and the short of it. But . . . ,” Salvado pauses, “. . . but this time around, especially the god damn long!”
    They drink and cheer, but Salvado, not yet finished, hushes them. “This has been one of our most difficult years. Many clients who have prospered greatly from our advice in the past have begun to grow skittish. Many more have publicly doubted us. Our confidence. But we have not wavered from our path and our vision. We have not let opinion dissuade us from doing what is right and what will ultimately be beneficial for us all. We’re on an epic journey, an epic tale that is still being written, and when it’s all over, it will be remembered as one of the great ones. To those who have stuck with us, and are poised to reap those rewards—sooner than later, I promise!—I salute you!”
    After the cheers rise and fall, Salvado raises his hand to make one last salutation. “And finally I’d like to make a special shout-out, a toast to the man who a few years back got right what 99.9 percent of the financial world got wrong. The man who immersed himself in the data and saw the potential to make billions on the sub-prime misery of