Chapter 63
Buy ReWire now on Amazon for only $3.99
Jack knew that if he didn’t do something constructive he’d go crazy. Dvora felt the same way and drove them into the City. He wanted to take the ferry and a cab to the office, but she enjoyed driving and was way better at it than Jack was. She drove at least thirty percent faster than he did and it scared the hell out of him. He couldn’t help stomping his foot on the imaginary brake pedal on the passenger’s side. One particularly assertive move to pass a taxi had him shrinking back in the seat and sucking air.
Dvora finally had enough and said, “If you are going to tense up every time I make a lane change you are going to have a stroke. I graduated first in my class at Bob Bondurant’s. Just because you can’t drive this way safely doesn’t mean I can’t.”
Dvora needed a potion to keep her arthritis at bay. She dropped him at the office and headed into China Town to her herbalist. He made sure the blinds were closed tight in the conference room and laid out the history of the stocks again. Something nagged. He knew something and didn’t know what he knew or how he knew it. He’d been born in time to be part of the computer revolution, but he was still more comfortable with the slow speed of paper held in his hands than computer text scrolling across a screen.
He had asked one of his US brokers to send him forty-six annual reports and 10-K’s. He was only interested in eight of them, but he needed the smoke screen of interest in the other thirty-eight. He picked up the annual reports for ReWire, Genotopian, Double Helix, ReGenatronics, and Ecoplan, all genetic engineering firms. He had looked through a dozen other annual reports for companies in the same business and they didn’t have even a hint of questionable stock activity.
Of the suspect companies, three were headquartered in the Bay Area. One wasn’t. Two were old companies who’d moved into genetic engineering recently. Two were small capitalization stocks and three were medium capitalization stocks. Genotopian and Ecoplan had three out of seventeen total directors in common, but no other company even had one. He threw the annual reports on the floor in disgust and paced back and forth in front of the now clean dry-erase board.
He walked back and forth, eight paces and quick turn each way, eight paces and turn, not looking at reports, not thinking about them, knowing he’d get the hit by trying easy.
He walked back and forth, then jogged and finally sprinted, turning the conference room into a cone drill from football fields long ago. Something tickled at his oxygenated brain. He walked over to the pile and bent to pick them up and restack the dead trees. He stopped. Sweat dripped onto a couple of the reports. Two of the three reports weren’t standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven. One looked to be about ten-by-fourteen and the other could have been a seven-by-seven. When he had thrown them on the floor, two had landed open.
Genotopian’s was on the top. It was the smallest and he could see the blue highlighted paragraph. “…cutting-edge research into the Hepatitis C problem, concentrating on the area which has shown the most promise…”
Double Helix was right below in and the section said. “…at the front lines of the battle against Hepatitis C, the…”
He knew he’d seen something similar in the two others. He knew his sister worked in antiviral research so he didn’t need to check. He picked up Ecoplan’s annual report and thumbed through it, knowing it would be there: “…very proud of our leadership in Hepatitis C research, offering real hope for a viable cure for…”
That couldn’t be the common thread but when he asked the database to look for it in the rest of the companies listed, it was. All of the companies that were being played were doing antiviral research. But so many others were, too, and were bigger players. What was different about these?
Because all the companies were working in the same area someone who was an expert in that area would have an inside edge on their performance and would be able to play them. That inside knowledge, combined with the disinformation plan his group detected, would give a stock trader a decided advantage over the market. It was a long forced march from disinformation to the attempted murder of his sister.
Buy ReWire now on Amazon for only $3.99
He stood up and stretched and walked back over to the eraser thinking he had the answer pegged. He put stock activity back up on the white board. He’d done it so often he could almost do it by memory. He stepped back after half an hour and looked at it, again disappointed. Eleven of the short sale periods did not coincide with a period of time before a press release or a disinformation campaign, yet the stocks had tanked shortly after the short activity.
Unless the people playing these stocks had precognition or divine guidance, there was no way they could be playing the stocks the way they were playing them. Maybe they had ESP like him?
The hunger cramps finally got him. He walked down stairs to the kitchen to whip up a thousand calories. He was washing down the last of his snack with filtered water when the idea came up and nibbled at him. He was missing something and it was because of the search parameters his group used. He ran back up the steep stairs, taking them three at a time, careful to plant his feet in the middle of the steps. He had a hell of time finding the guidelines Alice used when she wrote the program. When he did he had to read her notes three times.
“…incidents or events which would be interpreted by a reasonable person as matching the legal definition of ‘acts of God’ are not included in the program parameters. All such events, their dates and background information have been included in the original database. All movements of share price, calls, puts, or short interest above the thirty day moving average are also included. The above information may be included in the program parameters by rerunning the program at the prompt and running the version of the program labeled ‘With Acts of God’ If you wish to view the data that has been interpreted as acts of God, pull up the file labeled ‘Acts of God’.
Jack ran the program with “Acts of God” and immediately matched the acts of god against the incidences of heavy short activity in the stocks. His stomach churned. He nearly dropped his laptop when he turned to throw up in the wastebasket.
Buy ReWire now on Amazon for only $3.99