But this was not all that Elliot did, not by any means. After all, anyone with a few million bucks and an antisocial personality could set up an untraceable mix-tech, global com-link. Mr. bin Laden, for example, among other miscreants. Elliot's real value, and the reason he was effectively paid millions of dollars for what amounted to perhaps seven or eight hours of service, was that he made things happen that otherwise could not; he provided capital and the smarts to leverage it to the greatest possible illegal effect. He and his tiny band of infidels had researched several thousand stock price surge patterns and painstakingly built a proprietary trading program that followed the documented natural arc of these surges using best-fit modeling within a field of scattershot data points. He then started to buy the stock in question and drive up the price, of course. But that was not all; once Elliot's trading gambit began, he didn't just slavishly recapitulate the curve with simplistic buying and occasional selling; instead he created it organically, he birthed it, which was to say that he used several thousand linked trading platforms that he empowered with randomizing block-size choosers and let run autonomously, giving the platforms a buy bias but also letting them react in real time and differentially to spontaneous market information. This meant that he allowed some of his trading platforms to make "bad" decisions, very much the way real flesh-and-blood traders did, getting in or out of a market surge too early or late. He also employed a mix of the patterns typically utilized by day traders, retail brokerages, private wealth managers, investment banks, and big institutional players such as pension fund managers and mutual fund companies. His platforms traded not just with and against all the legitimate traders in the market but blindly against each other as well. The result was not a simulation of a real stock surge but a real-life, real-time rise that was, from a statistical point of view, utterly legitimate.
The trick was to induce enough other legitimate traders to buy with sufficient speed and volume that Elliot's platform trades were hidden within the general movement of the stock. He started a little trading fire, hoped it caught, then added gasoline to it. Which was also to say that were the SEC to examine the general trade data, it would be hard-pressed to filter out and reveal Elliot's platforms. It was that sophisticated. Which, again, was also to say he'd probably bought some wee black-market SEC software, when rarely available, and studied it closely.
Elliot had an excellent record. Never exposed or investigated. And he was picky as hell. Had turned Martz down a few times. In general his bias was toward industries or companies that were experiencing a lot of market volatility. Tweaking his model continuously, Elliot stealthily moved around among New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Melbourne. Each exchange or bourse had its own wrinkles, of course, its own trading rules, national holidays, weather seasons, electoral cycles, and sporting events. Best time to do a British lift? When the World Cup was playing on the same weekend as the Wimbledon finals. Trading volume always light on that summer Friday morning in late June or early July. Best time in Japan? During the Japanese World Series with a typhoon predicted for Tokyo. And so on. The stock had to have a story that made the restoration of its price somewhat plausible. Couldn't be in a dying industry, couldn't be in a takeover battle, for trading patterns around those were heavily scrutinized. Couldn't involve weapons systems, a personal belief of his, and couldn't directly enrich any of a select group of people, including Rupert Murdoch, Donald Rumsfeld, or George Soros. Elliot had a few standards. If necessary, he was able to trade one stock simultaneously across multiple exchanges, his trading patterns customized by location. It made for mind-boggling computer research and programming ability. It also meant that Elliot performed only two or three lifts a year and no more. He didn't want to get caught, after all.
Although he was brought in to work for others, Elliot watched the rising stock price with his own goal in mind, which was to get out gradually before the top was reached. In essence, this concept was paradoxical, because every sell order put downward pressure on the price. The trick was to front-run the market's natural conclusion of the short-term, secular rise in the stock's price. Buy less and sell more simultaneously. By the time the stock had topped, Elliot had sold his shares back into the very same heated demand he had created, booked jaw-dropping short-term profits, and initiated a secondary, obfuscatory buy-and-sell pattern of trading, very often one that maintained an artificially high price that was itself 5 or 10 percent below the stock's high. This rear-guard action often resulted in minor short-term losses that shaved at the major gains yet confirmed and publicly ratified the overall movement of the stock. The whole game could take two or even three days to play out, but the essential gambit would transpire in the next five or six hours.
And then I can relax, Martz thought, and go get my prostate biopsied. Once the Good Pharma stock rose near his break-even point, his own trading specialists would reduce his holdings in it, leaving him if not in the black then having suffered a loss of only a few percentage points-good enough, under the circumstances. He was down about $107 million; if he could get back $80 or $85 million of that, he'd consider himself whole and make back the difference another way.
All of this sounded very good in theory. But it still came down to two men, Tom Reilly and Chen. They would need to get started soon, given when the markets opened on the other side of the world. He returned to where Chen was sitting.
Chen rose. "I am going to leave now."
Martz said, "You don't want to do that."
"Why?"
"Because you'll be arrested for illegal stock market transactions before you can leave the United States."
Chen smiled. "I am a Chinese citizen."
"So?"
"My government would not allow it."
"Chen," said Martz, sitting down next to him, "the Chinese government arrests foreigners every day in China, as you know. It's a concept they understand well. We do it, too. There are a lot of people who are very antagonistic toward China's rogue behavior. Mostly conservative politicians. Your arrest would be a matter of personal satisfaction to them. I can arrange for them to praise this event on the floor of the United States Senate. Fast. In a day or two. I'm a very well-connected guy, Chen. I contribute to all their reelection committees."
The translator said all this but looked a little amazed himself. Chen listened, then nodded, his dark eyes showing nothing, however.
"The last thing you want to do is be arrested for illegal trading here. This will launch an investigation into everything you have ever done, and like a fatal disease it will touch all of the people to whom you have ever given information. It will cause loss of face. All those businessmen and government officials. All those Western companies that have those nice special arrangements with you and your people. You know this better than I do, Chen. You will become persona non grata. No, worse. You will have cancer and be terminally ill." He looked directly at Hua. "Will that translate?"