The Last Trade by James Conway

killer—discovers the bloody footsteps leading to the open window. Two stories down, with one to go, he stops. There is no longer a ladder. As he grabs the edge of the grate and prepares to swing his body around to the hanging position, he peeks up once more and sees movement in Weiss’s window. A man’s bald held thrusts out, looks right and left and then down. When his eyes lock with Havens’s, there’s a moment of confusion, then mutual recognition. It’s Laslow, the fixer from the club last seen harassing the bottle girl.
    In an instant Laslow is out the window and lunging toward the first ladder. Havens hangs from the edge of the escape and drops to the sidewalk. He falls to his hands and knees and starts scrambling, running before he’s fully up. He heads east along the empty sidewalk of 93rd Street. At the corner of First Avenue he allows himself his first look back and, thinking that he might have seen the flash of a body under a distant street lamp, he begins to run even faster.
    At Second Avenue he sees the first pedestrians and car traffic, but still not enough of either in which to get lost. He turns left and zigzags southward through the cross streets, between Second and Third, then Lex, Park, and Madison, finally staggering into the darkness of Central Park at the entrance at 79th and Fifth.
    As he runs, he calculates. He creates several models that consider the likelihood of Laslow catching him (high), knowing him (absolutely), and/or how quickly he might get information about his address from Rick Salvado and make his way to his apartment (fifteen minutes, a half hour if he had to go back to Weiss’s place to find or finish whatever prompted his return).
    There is no question about whether any of this will happen. The only variable is when.
    Only under the cover of trees on a silent footpath does he allow himself to slow and look back to see that no one is following him. For Havens, Central Park at night never felt so safe.
    As he walks, glancing back every twenty steps, heart desperately thumping, he thinks about Weiss and can’t help but feel that this is all his fault. In addition to making a fortune off the misfortune of others and losing his wife and his child, now he’s brought death upon an innocent young idealist. After all, he’s the one who put Weiss on the case of looking into the validity of the positions held by their own employer. He’s the one who asked him to look for philosophical inconsistencies and numerical irregularities.
    And he’s the one who didn’t object when Weiss told him about the proprietary, insanely powerful, and in all likelihood highly illegal financial tracking software he’d somehow just gotten hold of.
    Yet when the young man called him yesterday, breathless and incredulous, he refused to let him tell his story. His theory. Havens told Weiss to come to him when he had facts. Confirmation. He told Weiss he wasn’t interested in stories and gave him his all too familiar lecture about the danger of words, and how only numbers, only the truth of data, could reveal anything worth acting on in the financial world. Weiss begged Havens to hear him out, but he refused. He said it would only skew his read on the only thing that mattered: the data.
    Only as he approaches the exit on the west side of the park, near 59th Street, does Havens realize that Danny Weiss’s small red flash drive is in his front pocket.

 
    TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18

1
    Hong Kong
    F ifteen minutes before midnight she gets out of a taxi and walks in a black raincoat toward an unlit dock made of rotting creosote-soaked timbers jutting into the harbor near the Star Ferry Pier. Halfway down the dock she turns left and strolls up a steel gangway that takes her onto the deck of a seemingly out of commission barge.
    Before she reaches the main hatch, it opens from the inside. She steps into the dim light of a hallway, and when the door closes, a