Chapter 45
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If Lee hadn’t told Jack about Uncle Chin’s precautions, he would have had a hard time spotting them. A very large Chinese man walked a constant thirty feet in front of them. He turned his body at the waist every few seconds, scanning the crowd and then looking down at his watch, as if worrying someone was late. He wore what was now traditional garb for blue-collar Chinese in Hong Kong: Levi’s, probably knockoffs from Indonesia, a sweatshirt from an Ivy League college that didn’t exist, and black cross-trainers.
When the security guard asked the man his business he replied with the high-pitched voice of a boxer who had taken too many punches. He spoke slowly enough so Jack could understand that the man was supposed to see his cousin off. The man’s eyebrows were thickened with scar tissue and what little nose he’d had before his career in the ring was now flattened, more on the left side of his face than the right.
At first he felt sorry for the young man and the damage the ring had done to him, but when they moved closer he could see that the boxer was near his own age. He expected to see the dullness of a punch-drunk fighter’s eyes. Instead there was a merry twinkle, like a murderous Santa, as he laughingly put the girl at the counter at ease, knowing his face was scary.
Jack and Lee ignored Chinese propriety and stood holding each other until there was no more time. He walked through the metal detector and it beeped, saddening him. He had already emptied keys, coins, and mobile into the dark green doggy dish. Then he remembered the bottle. He gently placed the bottle into the bowl and walked back through, hoping for a miracle. No beep.
He stood staring down at the little bottle, feeling the crowd surge past, ignoring their upset. Lee stood just outside the security area, enjoying the look on his face. The cousin, who had been so late, had the aisle seat two seats behind him, covering Jack’s back. He wondered at Uncle Chin’s precautions, not the extent, but the ease with which he set them up, and the quick availability of resources. Uncle Chin had known the vendetta of the Tongs before. Before he started doing business with the old boys he had written off the labels of pirate and smuggler as jealousy or character assassination. Now he wasn’t as sure.
The plane turned and raced down the runway, getting closer and closer to the water. Right before it seemed certain they’d end up as a Boeing canoe, the pilot pulled them up into a steep climb. The plane turned over the waterborne village of boat people at the end of the runway and the pilot gunned it, heading straight toward the hills of the new territories. For the first time in years, Jack’s back didn’t hurt on the return flight. The rest of him throbbed like an abscessed tooth.
The whole insider-trading scheme didn’t sit well. He pulled company’s records on his Air to make sure they had no common officers or board members. Other than genetic engineering, they had nothing in common. There were 157 publicly traded companies that did genetic engineering around the world. Why were these five in play?
If someone were going to go heavy into insider trading, these firms wouldn’t be first choice. The industry made sense, but Double Helix and Genotopian were so thinly traded any activity in them would raise questions. ReWire and the others had plenty of activity, but he still couldn’t see the connection. Someone could have stumbled onto a conduit into one of the companies, and then decided to pursue more, but why pick genetic engineering? Why not Internet connectivity or computer network software, or any of the mid-level software companies that responded heavily to rumors?
Jack didn’t need to know why, but he did need to know more than he knew. He started at the very beginning with each company, looking at ReWire first. The company was originally established as a dairy farm, expanding into breeding and fertilizer production in Lodi, California in 1941.
The company stayed private and low-key successful under its founder, J. “Bunny’ Fowler, until 1981, when Bunny had a major stroke. His family was killed in a car wreck two years before and it had taken the heart out Mr. Fowler. Fowler was supposed to be in the car, but he had chosen to ride with a business associate instead. He had the great good fortune to have hired Donald P. O’Hare to the business nine months before the wreck that had taken his family and his drive.
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Donald took family money and future cash flow from the company and bought Bunny out-at exactly the wrong time. The inflation of the early eighties caused fertilizer prices to shoot up, making the dairy industry in California a money-losing proposition, even with price supports. O’Hare hung on and pumped more family money into the company.
In the mid-eighties, Donald got smart or lucky. Donald diversified into genetic engineering, buying a little lab in Davis, California. It was illegal to buy humans, but the top-flight scientists didn’t want to leave their experiments, so they came along. One of the assets Donald bought was a patent on one of the first genetically altered serums for bovine hoof-and-mouth disease. The serum wasn’t important enough to list as a line item on the annual report when he bought the laboratory. There was an outbreak, the lab came through with serum and Donald was a hero. He took the company public right after that.
The stock had gone public at 15. It had doubled and split, tripled and split, and doubled and split again and was now trading at near twenty. Shareholders who bought as an Initial Public Offering had seen their investments of fifteen dollars a share become nearly two hundred and fifty dollars. Good so far, but that twenty dollars a share it was selling for now was down from a high of 31.825, just fourteen weeks ago. The latest earnings estimates cut thirty percent off the bottom-line, and five brokerage firms lowered their recommendations from neutral to under-perform. One regional firm, specializing in biotech, put out an emergency bulletin to its top clients saying, “…sell as fast as you possibly can.”
Cathay Pacific had premium-quality sound. He plugged his noise canceling headphones into the jack. He absent-mindedly channel-hopped and stumbled on a great classic rock mix. Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine” ended and Cream came on.
Bad luck and trouble were my only friends.
I’ve been down ever since I was ten.
Spoonful, Spoonful, Spoonful
The song was appropriate for recent news on ReWire.
Impurity in culture leads to FDA investigation. Former manager sues for sexual harassment. SEC alleges irregularities in audit.
Most of the stories were prefaced with statements like:
“An insider who has spoken only on the condition of anonymity,” or the ever popular, “Industry insiders say.” Someone familiar with securities trading would say, “Short sellers who got spanked are trying to cover their ass by planting rumors to drive the stock down.”
The liberal press tried to paint short sellers as bad or even evil. Short sellers were, by far, the best early warning radar the market had. Short sellers were in it for the money, pure and simple. Unlike regulators who get paid whether they are right or not, short sellers only make money when they are right. They looked at companies or industries with a microscope. They looked for problems that others hadn’t seen yet. Then, they would borrow stock, sell it, and wait for others to see the same the problems. If they spotted a genuine problem and the market accepted it, they would buy the stock they shorted back at a much lower price. If they were wrong in their valuation theory, they had to raise money to buy stock at a higher price to cover their short position.
The ones Jack didn’t like were the rumormongers among them. They wanted it to be easy. They’d take a position in a stock, likely as not based on something they heard at a bar or in the gym. When it didn’t pan out, they wouldn’t simply cut their losses and move on. Instead, they’d try to create enough bad news to help them out of their bad judgment.
He scanned through the news stories on Genotopian, Double Helix, Life Force, and Med Gene. The stories could be divided into three basic types. First was hard news, from boards of directors, officers of the companies, suppliers, or customers. The second type was the will-o’-the-wisp ‘anonymous industry sources’ story. The third was what he thought of as Acts of God, despite not believing in the whole invisible friend thing.
Some poor schmuck president of a company, after ten years of eighteen-hour days, six and sometimes seven days a week, would exercise his stock options, buy a Ferrari and wrap it around a tree as he headed to his new palace in Woodside. Or a chief scientist went helicopter skiing and took a ride on an avalanche. There was even a story about a truck laden with LPG taking a wrong turn and blowing up right next to a lab.
Very few people ever gave luck the credit it deserved. Meghan believed firmly in Karma, saying people found the luck they deserved. Jack wasn’t so sure.
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