Thief in Need

By Michael Dirubio

Michael Davidson and crew are back!  Who do you turn to when help is needed?  Why not your local thief?  When the niece of a good friend is murdered, Davidson is pressed inot service to help catch the culprit-  A rouge billionaire Wall streeter.  The sequel to Thief in Law has the gang returning for more crimes and more adventures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MIchael Dirubio
• Release date: Dec 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780997086096

Michael Dirubio

Michael Dirubio is a twenty year veteran of the US Submarine Service.  Time spent in Coco Beach Florida convinced him that submarines or space craft, it made no difference, they were cool.  His debut novel Unity, is a realistic look at the manned space program and what might be possible in the near future. He is the author of 11 novels.

Book preview

Dedication:  To Judi.  Always.

This novel is a work of fiction.  All characters are fictional and are based on no real people.  Real places and companies are used but they didn’t do the things they actually didn’t do. Copy right is 2017 and all rights are reserved. For all things on Michael Dirubio, please visit www.michaeldirubio.com

Other works from Michael Dirubio

Unity

System 112

The Journal of Daniel Alfredson

Empire Man

Thief in Law

Quinru California

Thief in Time*

––––––––

*Forthcoming

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER ONE

The large plaza at Broad and Exchange place still had people walking around at 8:40 pm despite the late hour and the cold. The night was damp and chill as only lower Manhattan could be on the 20th of December 2015. The plaza sat in the back half of the block as the front looked over the columned facade of the New York Stock exchange building.  Stone and concrete slabs, the space was decorated for the season with strings of lights and a tree covered in tinsel.  The fake war on Christmas had apparently missed this spot with wreaths and colored balls all over every surface.

Finance workers in suits and dresses, wrapped in overcoats against the chill scurried around even at this late hour.  The industry was famous for late nights and long hours for its workers.  The plaza led out to the parking structure elevators which made the building very desirable among other reasons. Location was one of those reasons as the building sat smack in the middle of everything in lower Manhattan:  The Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve building, the new Trade center tower. Hell, even the Trump building was next door. And there was parking?  Fagehtabouit!

The main tower was forty stories of stone and glass and strength.  The structure was indicative of the newer style of architecture built in the 30’s: fewer columns and more functional style.  The tower itself was in a haphazard pyramid style:  The floors got smaller at intervals as you went up.  This made for some balconies at the upper levels, and the whole thing was topped by the penthouse and the helicopter pad that simply couldn’t be built in these post 9/11days, what with flight restrictions and all. But the building saw its share of jet copters come and go over the course of a week.

The lower street levels were the usual jumble of coffee shops, high-end retail and smaller firms.  The main tower held only three firms and one of them, Atlantean Capital, dominated the building. The boutique trading and wealth management firm did things differently than others on Wall Street.  They had the top twenty floors, and the work areas should have been packed with people, even now.

That was not the case.

As it was tonight, most evenings, the place was a ghost town by 6:30.

That was one of the reasons Lizzie was working there past 8 on a Friday. It wasn’t that she had no other life, she did.  It was just that her shoe box of an apartment in Brooklyn was noisy and she had always preferred the quiet.  So she worked at the office and often did it late. At 26, the thin, frizzy haired woman was pretty enough but not overwhelmingly so.  A generous mouth, with hazel eyes hidden behind thick glasses which sat on an upturned nose. When people passed her on the street, she didn’t get a second look. Perfectly ordinary.  But if you could get her talking- especially about numbers...

Well, then Elizabeth Batters stopped being ordinary and became extraordinary.

Maybe even superhuman.

To say that the woman was smart was understating it a bit.  She was ferociously intelligent. Lizzie was just finishing her doctoral thesis on Convex Stochastic Control and Conjugate Duality in a Problem of Unconstrained Utility Maximization under a Dynamic Swapping Model. Quantitative analysis was a difficult subject under any circumstances and particularly challenging when applied to finance.  But it was really just math and more numbers. And Lizzie had a gestalt with numbers that bordered on a love affair.

Financial companies had been hiring math whizzes and computer people for decade’s now.  The whole world came down to numbers, even in finance.  The ones and zeros of computer code could be dollars and cents when arranged correctly. Risk analysis and the regression models just presented the numbers in a different way. If you just looked at the data model...

And that’s where Lizzie lost most people.  The vast majority, even her family members, would let their eyes glaze over and nod politely until they could escape.  She was used to it by now.

Even Eddie Yuan, the other intern at Atlantean, would back out of the break room when she started talking numbers. He understood the math, but he didn’t love the numbers like she did.

The fact that she could earn a living while playing with numbers and computers amazed her.  MIT had arranged for the internship at Atlantean.  Her professor seemed to think it was a big deal: Ms. Batters, the firm only takes one or two people every five years.  You are very fortunate!

So lucky that Ms. Batters went into a cubicle farm on the 23rd floor and started looking at numbers for hours at a time. She swam in the figures and dove in the pool of statistics. It was mind blowing complex. But once they told her the goal: Maximizing wealth, or return on investment, she found she could quantify the non-linearities with relative ease. Some of the factors bored her; Price to earnings ratios and capital investments were strictly formulaic.  Other factors intrigued. How to quantify the risk involved in a changing regulatory environment? How do you measure the growing timidity of an aging CEO in a family owned business? Those were more difficult, but she persisted.

Lizzie put them all together in her model, and she began identifying the unicorns. That was what they called companies whose internal valuations were way above what the market currently had them valued at.  Unicorn had started as a Silicon Valley term that meant a tech startup that had a billion-dollar valuation without a track record of producing anything.  Now it just meant a company that was ripe to rise in the market.

Her first report in September of 2015, using the model, had identified three companies who looked to be- Sixth sigma towards the default valuation on the positive side.

So we should buy them? her supervisor had asked during her presentation. You have to be explicit with the eggheads; Lizzie could read the epithet on his face.  The thirty-five-year-old Ivy League asshole, who was her boss, had no idea of the numbers, but he did know what to do with the information. They bought what she told them to and did well.

The mid-October report she gave to her boss brought out the Dragons.  The opposite of the Unicorns, the Dragons were destined to sink in market value. Lizzie found fourteen companies whose valuations were way higher than they should be.

We can short these guys!  the Ivy League man told her with glee.

You can make money when a stock goes down?  Lizzie was dumbfounded.  More accurately amazed was a better way to describe it. She was puzzled by the fact that so many more companies were headed down than up.  In an efficient market model hypothesis, those numbers should be equal and a value greater than zero.  Why?

Number diving and more data model work turned up the underbelly of the financial world. Her natural inquisitiveness was unmatched in finding patterns.

She found it by accident.

***

Late one night she was performing a regression analysis using her data model, searching for the reasons for the inefficient market. Regression analysis in layman’s terms means to take old data where you already know the outcome and see if your model accurately predicts what has already happened.

Data models are tricky things. Ask climate scientists if data models are accurate predictors of future events?  The answer is no. 

BUT

Just because a data model correctly predicts what happened in the past, it does not mean that what it models for the future is necessarily what will happen.  ONLY that the prediction is the most likely event given the current data. Ignore it at your own peril. If nothing changes, then the most likely outcome of more human based carbon emissions is rising temperatures and rising sea levels. Whether that fits into your world view or not, the model is uncaring. If you want to ignore it, then by all means, buy land at the coast.

In the same way, Quants or quantitative analysis software in the financial industry did not cause the collapse of the housing market or the economy in 2008.  People, using their own greed and hubris, managed to do that.

Consider this.  John Paulson made a billion dollars for himself and more for his hedge fund when he shorted the CDO market in 2007.  His risk model correctly showed that 129 of the 130 slices of Collateralized Debt Obligations (people’s subprime mortgages) sold from Goldman Sachs would go down in price when those unqualified buyers defaulted on the loans. Which they did.

His risk model worked perfectly in that the CDO backed securities did go down in price.

It is a whole separate matter that Mr. Paulson should not have been allowed to look at those underlying mortgages when other investors couldn’t see the same things.  It is another matter entirely that Goldman was selling the CDO’s to normal investors while shorting them with their own money at the same time.  It is another matter entirely if those people should even have been given credit in the first place for mortgages they couldn’t afford, or if they even knew what they were signing for at the time.

The point is, the risk model worked fine. It was the asshole humans that screwed up the economy.

Lizzie’s models were good.  Very good. Her calls on the Unicorns and Dragons had turned out to be spot on.  Her regression analysis kept pumping out companies that shot up like rockets:  Google, and Apple, among them.  It also spat out firms headed down.  IBM and big oil looked to be the losers in her world, much to the chagrin of their investors.

But what caught her eye were the outliers. Companies that should have been rising but were stuck in a narrow trading range.  GE being the prime example.  Why the hell did the company rise in price only to fall off a cliff? That required more research.

The other side of the outlier coin was darker. Firms that should have been falling in price but were instead shooting up and Intrigued by the break in the pattern, she did some more investigating.

Frauds.

Names like Enron, Duke Energy, and Adelphia kept popping up.  What scared her, even more to the bone, was when she used the model on foreign exchanges and those companies.

The UK’s FSTE was fine, as was the German DAX.  But China was daunting. Fully twenty percent of the companies making up the Shanghai index were out and out frauds.  The numbers for the individual companies just didn’t add up.

Her research found Carson Block, a man who specialized in shorting the Chinese market by exposing the fraud within.  Lizzie’s other models showed China would soon stop allowing short sales rather than fix the fraud problem with the individual companies.

––––––––

Early December was the tipping point.  She normally did not have access to the firm’s internal numbers, the internal trades they were making.  As an intern, the firewall was firmly in her way.  And despite her knowledge of computers, hacking wasn’t her specialty.  But she didn’t have to hack since her asshole supervisor kept using her computer.  He was the superstar of the day with his stock calls (all due to Lizzie), and he kept pestering her for new names.  But silly rules never applied to superstars. Rules like, use your computer.

The man kept leaving himself logged into her computer.  The five-minute lockout rule was one that didn’t apply to him either.

After finding her supervisor logged into her computer to look at trades for the day, Lizzie got a hard look at Atlantean stock trades.

The disgust she felt at her supervisor soon turned to fascination and then to horror.

***

The late evening of the 20th found her at that same cubicle composing an email and running simulations. It wasn’t a black box, was it? She didn’t know.  She wasn’t behind the fire wall now.  Now, she was using old trades to verify...

The chunk of a door closing caused her to look up.

The cubicle farm was deserted.  This work area, designated Cabo, held the standard three-quarter wall modular furniture that had been sucking the life from US office workers since 1982. Thirty-five or so desks were arranged in a maze pattern that only an English hedge gardener would recognize. Just ten of the desks in Cabo were occupied, and only one human was there now, supposedly. Cabo was one of four work areas (Riviera, Waikiki, and Amalfi) that were served by a common core of elevators on the twenty-third floor. Lobbies, bathrooms and conference rooms were nearer to the center while the back corners held the emergency stairs.  Doors were closed normally entering the work spots, but you didn’t need a key card or anything.  All that security stuff was done downstairs off the street level.

Due to the late hour, only the emergency lights were on providing more gloom than light.  The glow of Lizzie’s computer shone in her eyes as she searched for the source of the noise.

A fleeting hope swelled that it was Carlos, the Puerto Rican janitor with the kind eyes, was quickly dispelled.  It was Friday.  Carlos and the cleaning crew didn’t work on Fridays.

Still standing in a crouch, Lizzie hit send on the keyboard and gave one last look around to see- nothing. Imagining things, she tried to wish her unease away in her mind.

She turned back to retrieve her chair which had swiveled away when she’d stood at hearing the noise.

The hand clamping over her mouth and nose was enormous and strong.

Her scream was muffled and cut off as she was jerked backwards.  The hand and arm pulled her in with absurd ease against a very hard chest and a soft gray sweater vest.

Breathing in through her nose was challenging, and she only got in half a breath as she tried to struggle. A second arm wrapped around her midsection from left to right as she was lifted into the air.

Violated.

Her body was being violated by someone she didn’t know, and she felt the crushing vise like grip, so she convulsed and arched against her captor.

Lizzie glimpsed a second figure dart in and felt him take both of her legs around the calves, lifting her up.

Fifteen seconds and she was being carried out of the cube maze towards the back stairs.

She began to feel faint as another half breath left in a futile attempted scream and she writhed against the men holding her.

A butterfly beating its wings would have had more effect.

The harsh fluorescent lights overhead were suddenly bright.  The men carried her into the back emergency stairwell and up the stairs rapidly.

Up?

Whaa?

She was having trouble getting oxygen to her brain and muscles, as her heart tried to beat out of her chest cavity from the adrenalin.

They only had to go two floors.  The men barely grunted while carrying her.

Lizzie recognized the twenty-fifth-floor landing through her fear.  This landing had two doors.  One led into the work cube farms.  The placard said this one was designated Rocky as a mountain theme was favored for this floor’s work spaces.

The other door led to the first outside balcony as the building gave way to smaller floor sizes up here.

Her eyelids fluttered as she felt the cold outside air through her tights as her peasant dress rode up from the rough treatment. Shifting their grip, her captors forced her hand to clutch at the cold railing. Whaa?

Still struggling as they lifted her, she barely registered the momentum swing to her body and then suddenly Lizzie could breathe again.

But the weightlessness was all wrong.

Elizabeth Batters did not scream as she plummeted to the ground.  Her body hit the cold plaza floor well away from the Christmas tree and the brightly glittering tinsel.  Her soul rose into the beautiful white light as the red from her ruined body spread slowly on the cold ground.

Davidson wasn’t too excited.  He wasn’t drunk either, despite what Sydney said. It’s just that he’d wanted this (these things) for a long time. And he was close to getting them.

The Broncos were in the Super bowl again, and the whole gang was getting back together!

THAT was why he was excited and why he’d had a drink. Or two.

The suite at the Bellagio was all high roller excess and elegance as only Vegas could deliver. An enormous sunken living room with a full bar, and entertainment area which featured a giant 90-inch flat screen TV.  The two bedrooms were on either side, and they featured full spa quality bathrooms.  The best part of the place was the two person soaking tub and the 1000 thread count sheets, as far as Sydney was concerned. Perched at the top of the main tower many, many, floors above the bright, warm pavement, the sun washed strip lay bare in front of them. The couple sat on a beautiful couch and waited on their guests.

Michael Davidson looked at the door and sighed. His girlfriend, Sydney Devereaux snickered at him. He was so childish sometimes; he could hear her thoughts in his head.  That got him a little even though she was right.

A watched pot never boils, she said, Texas accent thick.

I just want them to get...

The knock on the door interrupted him. Leaping from the couch, Davidson made it in seconds, throwing open the door.

Rick Sanderson stood in the opening, a wide grin splitting his handsome face.

Mikey!

The older man’s Ricky! was muffled as the two men engaged in a great bear hug.

Davidson broke apart to grab Rick by the shoulders. Let me look at you! he said searching his protégé’s face.

The twenty-nine-year-old man was still blonde and boyish looking, but he’d cleaned up from the youth Michael had first met in 2007. Well styled hair now topped his six-foot one-inch frame, and Rick looked like he could still shred with the best.  Athletic and blue eyed, his casual grey slacks were paired with a silk dress shirt and jacket and gave off a relaxed vibe.  The shoes were black leather loafers and looked to be Italian.  The whole shooting match was crowned with a gold Rolex watch which sparkled on his wrist.

Davidson grinned at the watch. After all, he’d given the young man the watch eighteen months ago after they’d...

Michael, don’t keep them standing on the doorstep. Let them in. Let them in. Sydney broke into his thoughts.

Davidson guiltily realized a pretty young woman was behind Rick, and he had ignored her.

Oh, shit! Sorry.  Come in! Davidson dropped his hold of Rick and moved aside as Rick gave Sydney a quick hug and a kiss going into the room.

Sydney!  Great to see you again- Thank you sooo much for keeping him in line. Rick told her. Let me introduce Cynthia Chen, my partner.

The dark haired, petite Asian woman was half a foot shorter than the five nine blonde Sydney, but she radiated a quiet calm and gravity that Davidson recognized immediately.

So you are the brains, he said shaking hands with the woman.  Thank god!  He led Cynthia into the suite still talking a mile a minute.  Rick needs all the help he can get, let me tell you.

The young woman murmured a hello, shy at being the outsider here.

Sydney took charge, greeting the other woman warmly and getting the guests settled.  She handed Cynthia a bottle of water.  This desert will suck you dry if you ain't careful.  Sydney had some experiences with deserts, and her accent seemed to get worse when she lapsed into memory.

Your room okay, guys? Davidson asked the couple when everyone has settled on the couch and the opposite chairs.

Fine, Mikey, Rick said sipping his drink.  Only the best right?

Davidson laughed.  Special occasion. He left it vague by which he meant the game or the gang.

So tell me about Palm Jumeirah, Michael asked, interested in what his friend had been doing since he’d left New York.

Rick’s eyes lit up.  It’s going great! Thanks for the seed money by the way.  But Mikey, oh man, am I working long hours.  The first six months was just head down grinding to learn the ropes.  16-18 hour days.  He sipped again looking at Cynthia.  It has backed off little-12 hour days now- and I’ve even let Cyn take a weekend off, but we are still hustling." 

Ha!  Being legit is a lot harder than... Davidson trailed off. His eyes locked on Cynthia. Shit, that was a mistake, he thought.  Does she know?

Sanderson saved him.  Cynthia knows everything, Mikey. She even knows you are Anderson Consulting.  She does the technical side while I do the people reading. Rick finished speaking and looked at the others.

Silence held for a moment.

Cynthia raised her melodic contralto voice and said, Mr. Davidson, you don’t have to worry.  Your money is as clean as I’ve ever seen. The IRS and the SEC love you.

Davidson breathed a sigh of relief.  He’d put a lot of time and effort into ensuring no one knew where that money came from.

Call me Mike, please.  Even Mikey is better than mister, he asked Cynthia.

The Asian woman nodded her head and said, "You certainly taught Richard some fascinating things while he was with you."

That’s one way of putting it, Davidson thought.  He wasn’t sure where to take the conversation, so he glanced at Syd.

She picked up her que nicely.  So, how is Silicon Valley and California?

Grinning, Rick shrugged. God that place, Sydney! The crazy geniuses, the con artists, the money. It is insane.

The four laughed easily as the partners regaled them with strange tales of the tech capital of the world.  Rick and Cynthia’s company, Palm Jumeriah Investments, worked the venture capital side of the house out in California.  Michael Davidson had a large percentage of the business because of his fifteen million-dollar stake. It helped that he saw very nice returns for his money.

"That HBO show Silicon Valley has it captured perfectly," the Oregon born Sanderson summed up for them in his surfer boy voice.

A knock on the door interrupted them and made Davidson jump up and throw it open only to be disappointed.  A Bellagio bell hop stood outside with a serving tray.  Davidson was confused- The food he’d ordered wasn’t due for a couple of hours?

Rick joined him in the door way.  My little addition, man, he said by way of an explanation.  I brought you and the others some local specialties.  He tipped the server and wheeled the tray over to the wet bar.  The bar angled so it could look out the huge back wall picture windows, showing the view of the dancing water fountains that the Bellagio was so famous for.

Rick took a bottle of liquor off the tray and showed it to Michael. Hanger One Vodka.  A little boutique distillery in Alameda, California makes it.  We got twenty percent.

He meant that Palm Jumeriah did not only do tech, but they were also branching out.

Davidson looked at the bottle.  I don’t know Vodka.  Syd will have to tell you.

Sanderson nodded.  Yeah, well this is for you. He took a second larger wine bottle from the underneath storage bin.  A magnum bottle of Chateau Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon was placed on the bar.

Davidson whistled.  "This is the Bottle Shock thing winery, huh?"  He referred to the movie that chronicled the little California wineries’ entry into a French wine tasting event. The event that shook up the wine world and established Napa Valley and Sonoma as players on the world stage. 

2013 is supposed to be their best vintage in years, Rick explained.

The last present out onto the bar was a twelve pack of beer.  I managed to get a twelve of Pliny the Elder from Russian River.

I’ve heard of this, Davidson said.  Supposed to be the best around and hard to get, ya?

Rick nodded.

Well, Graeme is going to have to weigh in on the beer. He knows the pints.

A serious look came over Sanderson’s face. He asked Davidson, I saw Ira and Gretchen downstairs checking in- is he here? The front desk said, no.  Sanderson concluded and watched his old boss.

"He’ll be here, Davidson said loyally.  He forestalled any other questions by mixing a quick drink using the vodka.

The two men made their way back to where the ladies were chatting amiably.

Try, this, please, Davidson directed to his girlfriend.

Dr. Devereaux sipped delicately at first and then took a healthy slug like the sorority girl she was. That’s nice!  You mix a good drink, Michael.

I used to bartend for my dad’s parties when I was a kid.  I make a mean highball, Davidson explained to everyone. Sydney complimented the vodka which made Rick smile.

Another knock on the door got Sydney and Michael over to greet more guests.

Davidson flung open the door, and his jaw dropped.

Oh my god!

A dark skinned, broad shouldered pregnant woman got a careful hug from Davidson.

Her companion, a thin, well not quite as thin as before, man that Davidson saw from the corner of his eye was grinning madly.  Hey!  Mikey!  Sydney!"

He released Gretchen Gonsolvo to grab Ira Levinson.

Davidson pounded the man on his back and saying over and over, You did it! Congratulations, you did it!

More back slapping, hugs, belly touching and exclamations abounded as Rick and Cynthia joined the foursome at the doorway.

Davidson could not get over the married and pregnant woman. After all, he’d seen the pair of them less than a year ago and neither had said anything about children at the time. Course we were busy...

The group made its way to the couches with Gretchen sitting fairly well.  That would not always be the case as she got bigger.

How far along, Gretchen? Rick asked.

Second trimester, week 18, I would say, Sydney chimed in.  Even though her specialty was pediatric oncology, she had some ob gyn experience.

The Brazilian woman confirmed Sydney professional knowledge with a nod and a smile.  The six had barely settled into a chat when a fourth knock on the door sounded.

Told ya, Davidson smirked at Sydney as he ran to greet the newcomers.

Prepared to see his oldest male friend, Graeme Donniger, at the door, the sight of the 40ish, dark haired, small woman, threw him off.

Hey! ...oh hello?

Michael noted a few things in a quick glance.  His old partner Graeme was off to the side and grinning at him with his crooked teeth and lopsided way. The pretty short woman in front of him was clearly with Graeme in some way and...

She was pissed at Davidson.

And he knew why this woman would be mad at