Dead Cat Bounce (14 page)

On Wednesday night there was another message from the Baron, short and sharp as ever:
Whistler or Drizzler?
Jonah cringed. He was no Drizzler. He had to break through the wall.

He decided to invest in a company called Games Boutique, a major retailer of video-game software and hardware. He had three reasons for thinking that Games Boutique would be a good trade.
First, they had recently made an announcement that—in the absence of any new devices—their quarterly earnings had been poor, bringing their stock price to unusually low levels. Second, consoles and handhelds kept getting better and better, and there was another new one due out in one month. And third, he felt that the market had not adequately factored in the extent to which kids loved video games. Sure, investors knew that there were various waiting lists for the next-generation consoles. But what they, as adults, couldn’t understand was that video games were
the
thing. Forget books, forget movies, forget TV—if you wanted to capitalize on every young boy’s wish list, you went for video games.

Jonah bought five thousand pounds’ worth of shares at sixty-five pence per share. Three weeks later, the stock skyrocketed up to ninety pence, and Jonah sold all his shares. He’d made a profit of 3,600 pounds.

From that day on he forgot about fear.

Back in the present, Jonah quashed the tinglings of apprehension that had begun to take hold. “Sure,” he said calmly. “How much do you want me to do?”

The answer came quickly. “Another hundred million. Pile on the pain! Focus on Allegro and OPM Insurance, but choose a couple of others and hit them hard.”

One hundred million!
Jonah’s biggest previous trading outlay had been fifty thousand. He knew enough, though, to keep that information to himself. “I’m on it,” he said.

“Good,” the Baron replied and hung up.

For the rest of the morning, Jonah set about placing his trades,
quietly singing as he did so. “Going supersonic, I’m feeling so bionic!”

Jonah jumped when the Baron’s briefcase landed on the desk beside him a few minutes before one o’clock. He was absorbed in the screens and eating a sandwich he’d had delivered. He’d had to pay for it himself, a fact that was annoying but that plagued everyone on the trading floor equally.

“Are we in?” the Baron demanded.

Jonah finished his mouthful, swallowing frantically as the Baron ripped off his jacket and logged on to his screens. “We’re in,” he eventually replied. “I’ve also cleared your backlog. There’s only one trade I can’t work out.” He picked the offending trading ticket out of the tray and held it up.

The Baron turned, raising his eyebrows, impressed. “One trade only? Good lad. But that can wait.” He dismissed the ticket with a quick flip of his right hand and turned back to the screens. “How much have we got on the table?”

“Five hundred and fourteen million pounds,” Jonah answered automatically, calling up the information that was stored in his head. “Market’s still up this morning, and we’re down, uh, thirty-five million on the price rises.”

The Baron swung his chair around to face Jonah directly. “You sound twitchy, iPod. Are you worrying that I’m steering you wrong?” Jonah was about to lie that of course he wasn’t, but the Baron didn’t give him a chance. “I’ve been speaking to a few boys over the water in New York. There is going to be a lot of selling pressure on these markets in the coming hours. A
lot
of selling pressure.”

Jonah glanced at the time. It was twelve fifty-six, four minutes until the New York Stock Exchange opened.

“This is a dead cat bounce, iPod. Mark my words.”

“A dead cat bounce?” repeated Jonah, relieved that he hadn’t had the chance to fumble his way through an answer about whether he questioned the Baron’s judgment.

“An old market term—refers to a market rally in a bear market. Even a dead cat bounces when it’s dropped!”

Jonah grinned. He’d been told about bull markets going up and bear markets going down, but now he had to add dead cats to the list? The financial markets were a zoo!

“So let us sit back and let the games begin,” the Baron continued. “These babies are about to go down in flames!”

It was now two minutes to the New York open, and while the Baron fiddled with his computers, Jonah wolfed down the rest of his sandwich, counting down the seconds, his eyes glued to the screens.

At one
P.M.
precisely, his screen went red as the markets opened massively down.

“Blood on the screen!” screamed Milkshake.

Jonah turned to the Baron, who gave a wry smile and said, “I thank you,” before standing up and shouting across the trading floor as if he were a flight attendant giving the safety briefing on a plane. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would kindly take your seats and fasten your seatbelts, we are about to hit some severe turbulence. Anybody who is long, the emergency exits are over there”—he pointed toward the windows. “Those of you who are short”—he turned back to the Bunker Boys and raised his voice another notch—“TUCK IN, LADS! FIRE AT WILL!”

Jonah joined the Bunker Boys in roaring back, “YES SIR!” as the adrenaline rose in him as fast as the number at the bottom of his trading screen was climbing. A tsunami of selling swept around the world. Fear and panic abounded, and the Bunker fed on it as a hyena feeds on rancid meat. They tore at it, savaged it, and devoured it in a state of frenzy, helping to drive the prices down further as their losses of the previous thirty-six hours reversed and Jonah’s trading screen turned from red to blue. They were now in profit:
Ten million. Twenty million. Thirty million
.

“Allegro Home Finance rating to be downgraded. International Development Bank deal unlikely to materialize,” shouted Dog as the headline flashed across the news screen, sending Allegro’s share price into freefall.

“Allegro, Capital Mutual, and OPM Insurance most likely next to go bankrupt, say analysts,” yelled Jeeves.

“Treasuries rallying as investors fly to safety,” Jonah chipped in.

“The market has given up resistance,” said the man on the television.

“Shares driven down by heavy shorting,” flashed a headline on Bloomberg.

Forty million. Fifty million.
With the profits escalating, the Baron telephoned upstairs for clearance to increase the bets. It came without issue, and they sold another one hundred million—piling on more pain, feeding the panic that the world’s banking system was rotten to the core, that it would fail, possibly taking the world’s economy down with it—and all the time reaping more profits for themselves.

“Analysts say massive shorting renews fears about the US financial system!” shouted Birdcage.

“Crisis at New York’s banks,” announced Jeeves, reading the first edition of the evening newspaper.

“Who cares!” laughed Dog. “The Bunker’s bonuses are going to be huge!”

Sixty million. Seventy million
.

Jonah was in awe. The Baron’s bet had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where yesterday there had been inertia, today there was momentum, an unseen force pulling prices down, and an equal and opposite force driving their profits upward. They and the other shorts around the world had the market on the run.

Eighty million. Ninety million.

“It was a day of complete capitulation,” said the man on the television at around seven
P.M.
that evening.

By that point, everything was winding down at the Bunker. Jonah was clearing out the last of the trading tickets, the Baron had disappeared upstairs to discuss further increases in their trading limit, and the Bunker Boys had begun heading out to the pub to celebrate, Jonah motioning that he’d join them as soon as he was done.

As Jonah entered the final piece of information, he felt spent with the excitement and the concentration, but was also happier than he had ever been before. It was as if he had just finished his most ambitious race.

The number at the bottom of his screen was more than one hundred million pounds.

The opposite was
the case for David Lightbody. He’d left the Helsby Cattermole building long before Jonah. He’d had to get out. Scrotycz had been on his case all day, and the crash in the markets brought back dark memories. The Russian market, his main focus, had been one of the worst hit, even worse than in 1998.

He walked to Cannon Street and caught a District Line train home. There were no seats free, so he was forced to stand, hanging on to the overhead rail and gazing vacantly into space.

It had been ten years since the Russian financial crisis. Ten years since the model of the red Fokker triplane had arrived on his desk. And ten years since he had lost thirty million pounds on a single trade and with it his job. He’d been unemployable until Helsby Cattermole had knocked on the door. The salary was well below his previous one, but he didn’t have a choice: He had a young child and large bills to pay.

At first he thought that maybe the Baron had felt some sense of
responsibility for his firing and had arranged for the job offer. After all, he was the one on the other side of the original trade. But that thought was soon dispelled. From the day David arrived he was the butt of the Baron’s bullying. He was assigned—at the Baron’s insistence, he later discovered—to the Drizzlers’ Den, greeted with a second model red Fokker, and subjected to a floor-wide welcome e-mail that read:
How do you make a small fortune in Russia? Start with a big one and give it to Lightbody.

David complained. The bank did nothing.

The train stopped, and David looked to see where they were. It was Sloane Square, still another five stops until Hammersmith. He returned to his thoughts.

From then on, the Baron sought out every opportunity to make David’s life hell. And it was at the office Christmas party that David finally cracked. The Baron had been overtly flirting with David’s wife, Miranda, asking her why she was married to a Drizzler. David objected, and the Baron had mockingly suggested they fight for her hand in good medieval knight style. David immediately refused. He’d given up fighting a long time ago. By then, though, it was too late—the whole of the trading floor was baying for blood. It had been a set-up, a practical joke aimed at humiliating him once more. And it had worked. He became Biff, a Drizzler and a coward.

But that wasn’t the worst part of that night’s events. The Christmas party also seemed to trigger the beginning of the end of his marriage. It had been shaky ever since Jonah’s birth and David’s descent into depression, the “darkness” as Miranda called it. He had put it down to the stress of his job and the travel, but he knew
that wasn’t the complete truth. They lasted another three years, but divorce was inevitable. When Miranda was subsequently offered the job in America, she took it without ever looking back.

The train reached Hammersmith, and David began the forced march home, his thoughts turning to the son his wife had effectively disowned at the same time she’d ended things with him: Jonah.
What to do about Jonah?
It was bad enough watching the Baron and the other “shorts” driving the financial system toward oblivion, but to see Jonah at his side, laughing and grinning, was too much to bear. David hadn’t seen it coming. He knew that Jonah had enjoyed the three days he’d spent on the trading floor a few years back and that his relationship with his son was nonexistent, but he had put it down to Jonah’s adolescence. He’d had no idea that once again the Baron was working behind the scenes, acting as a mentor and guide while David had been too blinded by his own issues.

He had to come clean. He had to tell Jonah the whole story. Only then would he have any chance of getting Jonah away from Hellcat and the Baron.

The wind picked up as he stepped onto Hammersmith Bridge, whistling down the river from the west. He hunched himself up against it and increased his pace to get to the other side as quickly as possible.

He would do it tonight.

It was past ten o’clock when Jonah put his key in the front door. He wasn’t expecting his father to be up and started when David Lightbody appeared at the door and greeted him with a polite, “Evening, Jonah.”

“Uh, hi Dad,” said Jonah, fumbling to put his keys back in his pocket. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“We have to talk,” David said, grimfaced.

“What about?” Jonah retorted, a belligerent edge to his voice. Whether his father was looking for him to rethink going to work with the Baron or to chastise him for arriving home so late, he knew the conversation wouldn’t be a pleasant one.

“Jonah,” David said as he opened the door wider, “you’re still my son, and you’re living in my house. And I say that it’s time for a chat.”

“Fine,” Jonah grunted. Putting his briefcase on the floor, he followed his father into the sitting room. The room—with all its open space, white walls, straight lines, and contemporary furniture—was as cold as ever, and that didn’t even account for the lack of radiators (his mother had thought these were unsightly and so had instead opted for inferior underfloor heating). Like the rest of the house, this particular space had never been set up with a child in mind.

“Why don’t you sit down?” David asked, motioning to the chaise beside him, which Jonah knew to be uncomfortable.

“No thanks,” he replied, leaning against the wall. He wanted to make it clear he wasn’t interested in this “chat” taking any longer than necessary. Plus, he needed to use the bathroom after having spent three hours at the pub.

“Jonah,” David began, his tone firm, “what do I have to do to persuade you to go back to school?”

“Dad,” Jonah sighed, mimicking his father, “we’ve had this conversation. Forget it.”

“No, I won’t forget it,” David replied less calmly. “It’s a disgrace what is happening at the moment, and to think that you are a part
of it is unconscionable. I’ve been here before. You, the Baron, and the rest of the shorts are driving us to oblivion. You might make a lot of money, but the long-term cost is going to be enormous.”

“Uh huh.” Jonah shrugged. “And your point is?”