‘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.
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.’
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62