Authors: Nic Bennett
“What or who is Apollyon?” said Jonah. “It sounds like a space mission.”
“No idea,” replied David. “Google it.”
“I can’t. There’s no cell phone coverage here, remember?”
“Oh, yes. Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway. Start with the Red Baron one. It must be his personal account.”
Jonah clicked again. A list of years going back to 1992 came up on the screen.
“This year,” David whispered. The only other sounds were the buzzing of a fly and the faint hiss from the wood on the fire.
Jonah clicked again. A list of months appeared. “September,” he said, clicking once more.
The screen filled with a complicated combination of graphs, numbers, and letters. Jonah could see immediately that it was the trading records of some sort of investment fund. It was the same as the layout they had in the Bunker, showing performance, trades, dates, and times. Jonah scanned the page quickly, looking at the individual trades.
“Do you recognize any of this?” David asked.
Jonah nodded. “Yeah. It’s close to what we were doing in the Bunker, shorting the financial stocks, but the numbers are different, not as big. It also continues up to Friday, and Hellcat pretty much shut down on Wednesday.” He pointed to some of the trades. “There are a few Allegro Home Finance trades there, but they’re all sells. No one hundred million dollar buys.” Jonah thought it best not to add that the Baron had made eighty million dollars in profits so far this month; it wasn’t exactly the news he suspected his father wanted to hear.
“Look at some of the other months,” said David, the disappointment clear in his voice. “See if the trades are in there.”
Jonah scanned back through a year, but nowhere were there
any more Allegro trades. He also saw that the Baron wasn’t completely infallible either. In some months he had made a loss. Jonah felt almost disappointed by this fact. Not even the Baron got it right every time.
“Okay. Let’s try the Apollyon file,” said David.
Jonah exited the Red Baron A Fund and entered the Apollyon Two records for September. He had been quite calm when he had opened the first set of records, but this time his hand quivered slightly. This was all or nothing:
If the proof wasn’t in here, then what?
Jonah was acutely aware of his father’s presence behind his right shoulder. He could hear his breathing—short and shallow. He pressed down on the trackpad, and the screen seemed to change in slow motion so that for a moment Jonah thought it had crashed. When it finally loaded, he gasped. “Bloody hell!”
Jonah couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The numbers in front of him were enormous: bets of hundreds of millions of dollars on single trades; profits in the billions.
Suddenly he was aware of his father’s breath quickening,
“It’s there, Jonah. It’s there. Look, look!” His voice was rising, and his finger was moving toward the screen. “There. See it?”
Jonah looked. There were five buy trades in Allegro Home Finance stock, one out of London, one out of New York, one from Zurich, one from Hong Kong, and one from Chicago. The one from London was for one hundred million dollars. It was the exact same trade as the one David Lightbody was being investigated for—same amount, same time, same day.
“But this says the trade was made by Apollyon,” said Jonah, utterly confused.
“No, look at the bottom.” David moved his finger downward to a window headlined “Balancing Items.” He exclaimed, “Look, there it is again, going out this time!”
Jonah followed his finger. The one hundred million had been “sold” to Hellcat account number JL4193 on the evening of Sunday, September 14. The date rang in Jonah’s mind—
it was right after the U.S. government announced that it did not intend to bail out Allegro Home Finance!
“That’s my Scrotycz account,” David cried. “He transferred the trade to me. It’s there, Jonah. It’s there!” David spun away from the table, fists pumping. “Gotcha! You bastards!” he shouted in triumph. “Gotcha!”
Jonah meanwhile was urgently scanning through the previous months, running numbers in his head, shocked at the scale of what he was seeing. “Yep. We’ve got him, Dad, but this thing is huge. Do you know how much money they’re playing with?” he said. “It’s more than a hundred
billion
dollars.”
David spun back. “But that can’t be right. We figured that the Baron wasn’t working alone, but that’s more than a syndicate. That would make this Apollyon thing the biggest hedge fund in the world!” he exclaimed. Then he shook his head. “Which isn’t possible. I’d have heard of it if it was. It would be in the league tables.”
“It’s correct, Dad,” said Jonah. “I’ve double-checked. And what’s more, Allegro is the first time Apollyon—whatever it is—has ever got it wrong.” Jonah brought up the profits for every month since the records started. He motioned for his dad to peer over his shoulder. “Look, in one hundred and ninety-two months, there has never been a loss-making month. That’s statistically impossible.”
“Unless you’re using inside information!” David exclaimed. “I knew it!”
Jonah was now scrolling at high speed through the records month by month, his photographic memory absorbing every trade. “It’s global too,” he said. “The Baron must be one cog in a colossal machine. There are trades here from London, New York, Zurich, Hong Kong, Chicago, Frankfurt, Paris, Johannesburg, Toronto, Dubai, Mumbai, Moscow, you name it.” He continued to scroll. He could see a pattern in the trades. “Do you know what I think?” he asked. He didn’t wait for his father to respond. “It feeds off crises.”
“What do you mean it feeds off crises?” said David, now squatting next to Jonah.
“Every time there’s a disaster in the markets, it makes enormous profits. It’s been creaming it over the past months up until Allegro, and it’s done it before.” Jonah opened up the records from 1998. “Look at this: the Russian crisis, when you dropped thirty million. You didn’t stand a chance if they had the inside track.”
On the screen were a series of massive trades against the market.
“It’s a monster,” said David.
“And what about this one?” Jonah had brought up the records for September 2001. “On the day al-Qaeda flew their planes into the Twin Towers, Apollyon Two made more than a billion dollars and another billion in the following week. The Baron once told me that this had been a good trading day, but this is more than that: It’s as if they knew it was going to happen!”
The two of them stared at each other, and David said what Jonah was thinking. “Do you think that’s because they
made
it happen?”
Jonah could feel the fear rising again inside of him. A fund that engineered events such as 9/11 for its own financial benefit? A fund that had enough financial clout to bring the world’s banking system to the brink of collapse? What type of people were behind this behemoth?
But before Jonah could turn back to the computer to find out, the sound of an engine in high revs cut through the quiet of the camp, followed by the pitter-patter of running feet. They both turned toward the noise as Chippy burst into the clearing. “Where’s the rhino?” he shouted, his crossbow in one hand and a small radio-like device in the other.
“A rhino?” Jonah exclaimed as he looked around in panic and began climbing onto the table.
“Here. Right here. There is a rhino here,” repeated Chippy.
“Where?” David and Jonah shouted together this time. Surely it would be easy to spot a ton of armored animal flesh crashing about.
“The automated rhino tracker says it’s within fifteen feet of us,” said Chippy, looking at the device in his hand. He held it up in explanation. “We use GPS transmitters drilled into the rhinos’ horns so that we know where they are. A signal appeared ten minutes ago, right in the middle of the camp. Control radioed me to check it out.”
“There’s no rhino here, Chippy,” said David in an amused tone.
“Well, something is transmitting a signal. Have you got any GPS devices with you?”
“GPS? Not that we’re aware of,” David replied, shaking his head. “How accurate is that thing?”
“To a few feet,” said Chippy. He started walking toward them. “The signal is coming frommmm … here.” He stopped right next to Jonah.
Jonah looked at the laptop at his feet. “When did you say you first got the signal?” he asked.
“About ten minutes ago.”
Jonah looked at David. “That’s when we switched the Baron’s laptop on!”
“Shit,” said David. “It’s got a tracker inside it. Of course it has. No wonder he managed to find us so quickly in Amsterdam.”
“And follow us to the airport,” added Jonah.
“Quickly, switch it off,” said David, and Jonah jumped down from the table and powered down the laptop.
Chippy shook his head, his eyes on the receiver. “Nope. I’ve still got a signal,” he said. “Anything else?”
Jonah reached across the table and picked up the new iPod. Despite the heat, he felt cold. “He’s not tracking the laptop. He’s tracking me,” he said in a hush. “He gave me this on Friday as a present.” Jonah felt a pit in his stomach. Sure, he’d had to shoot the Baron, and sure, he understood the man was part of some evil, world-defiling operation. But the idea that their relationship was so meaningless that the last gift he’d ever given him was actually a GPS tracker still managed to crush him further. He pressed down on the button to turn it off and watched as the screen went blank.
There was silence in the camp as Jonah and David looked at Chippy, hoping that this would be enough. It took a couple of seconds before Chippy raised his head. “The signal’s gone,” he said, and the silence returned.
Jonah threw the iPod onto the table in disgust. He felt anger and hatred welling up inside. Why had the Baron even paid him any attention in the first place? The Baron had put a tracker on
him, so he could hunt him down; the Baron was part of this Apollyon thing. Jonah couldn’t figure it out … unless … unless …
the Baron was grooming him to be part of Apollyon!
The notion made more and more sense the longer he thought about it. And now that it had occurred to him, the mysteries of the past began to fall into place—why the Baron had sought him out that day his father took him to work, why the training game the Baron had given him had the initial “A” on its case, why he’d taken him to Amsterdam and they’d just so happened to run into the Baron’s own mentor.
“We must make plans,” his father said, interrupting his thoughts. “What do you think, Chippy?”
“They know,” Chippy answered enigmatically. “And they will come. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
“Is there another camp?” David inquired.
Jonah jerked his head up. “No! No way!” he burst out. “We’re not running again. They’ll keep finding us.” He could see the surprise in David’s and Chippy’s faces at his reaction. “The point of this place wasn’t only that they wouldn’t find us, Dad. We also have protection. We have the poaching squads, and we have you and Chippy.” An idea formed in his mind.
What was it his dad had said the Selous Scouts had done?
“We could do the opposite,” said Jonah.
“What do you mean?” said David with a puzzled expression on his face.
“He means: bring them here,” Chippy clarified, his leopard eyes afire.
“Yes,” said Jonah, feeling strength from Chippy’s understanding. “They think they are the hunters. We ran from Hellcat, and
we ran from Amsterdam. They’ll expect us to run again. So let’s do the opposite. Let’s turn the hunters into the hunted. Isn’t that what you guys did when you were in the Selous Scouts?” He looked to Chippy, who lifted his hand to his chin and started stroking it. Then he glanced at his father, whose expression had switched from puzzled to thoughtful.
“The Baron is a city man,” Jonah continued. “This isn’t the city. We have the advantage here. You know this world. He doesn’t. Let’s get Chippy’s man at the airport to watch out for him; and when he arrives, we follow him. When he gets here we …”
“Take him,” continued Chippy.
“And interrogate him,” finished David, nodding.
It wasn’t quite what Jonah was thinking. “I was going to say that we capture him so he can’t escape now that we have proof he set you up,” said Jonah. “Then we can get him into court.”
“No,” said David, now excited. “We have to get to him before he can hide behind expensive lawyers. We want him to talk. We have to find out what’s behind this Apollyon thing before it ever gets near a court. The trading files will clear my name, but they don’t tell us the whole story.” David’s eyes lit up as the implications of what they were about to do took hold. “You’re right, Jonah! You’re right!” He turned to Chippy again. “Will you put your man at customs on alert?”
“I will call him immediately,” Chippy answered.
“And is there somewhere secure we can keep the Baron once we have him?” David asked.
Chippy nodded. “There are some caves not far from here. They will make a very good place for an interrogation.”
“That should do the job,” said David grimly. “A few days in a cave with only rats for company, and the Baron will be desperate to talk.” As an afterthought he added, “Although we may have to make it quicker than a few days.”
Jonah didn’t like the sound of the word “interrogation”—or “rats” for that matter. “Will you hurt him?” Jonah asked, worried that his idea had morphed into something more violent than he had envisioned.
The question hung in the air for some seconds before David answered. “No. I will do what is necessary to make him talk, but I’m not talking about physical torture if that’s what you mean.” He turned to Chippy. “You never told us why you carry a crossbow?”
“I was culling some antelope,” Chippy replied, as if this was no big deal. “It’s important to control the size of the herd so that there’s no overpopulation.” He looked at Jonah. “The crossbow is more humane than a gun. There is no noise, and generally they don’t even know they have been shot.”
“Interesting,” said David. “Another one of those might come in handy in the next couple of days.” He began pacing around the table, deep in thought, counting off something on his fingers, very alert and very alive. He stopped and addressed Chippy. “We’ll need some other hardware. Can you put together an inventory of what you’ve got in your stores so that we can decide what we need?”