The other companies in Watersmark’s portfolio included Pecos, a large supermarket chain based in Texas and with operations in the southwestern United States; Silicon Solutions, a microelectronics company out of Canada; and a mining company in Australia.
Astor tried to imagine a connection between them. What might an industrial engineering firm whose smallest division manufactured elevators have in common with a supermarket chain or a mining company or a maker of specialized microchips? He could think of nothing. Nor could he link them to the bigger question: How might products manufactured by any of these companies allow someone to take control of an automobile?
Astor dug out the sheet of blue stationery from his father’s home that he’d found at Penelope Evans’s. Cassandra99. Still the word meant nothing.
She was there with my father, thought Astor. In our home. A home I swore never to set foot in again.
The answer was in Oyster Bay.
“Boss, the China boys are ready.” Marv Shank stood in the doorway, coffee in one hand, daily breakfast burrito in the other. “You good?”
“Be right there,” said Astor.
Whether he was good or not was another question entirely.
42
There were four of them, and they sat at opposite sides of the table. Astor and Shank, and Longfellow and Goodchild. Longfellow was his China hand. Goodchild was his currency man. There was no chitchat. No mention of his father’s death. No banter about the Yankees or the Mets or who had screwed which pretty young thing over the weekend in the Hamptons. Goodchild and Longfellow had Bloombergs on their desks, too. They knew the score. If anything, the conference room was colder than the trading floor.
“So,” said Astor, when he’d stared at them long enough. “What the hell’s going on?”
Goodchild was blond and lanky and English, with a narrow, pockmarked face. He splayed his forearms on the table and leaned forward. “Posturing,” he said, eyes darting from face to face as if sharing a secret. “They’re afraid the cracks are beginning to show.”
Longfellow nodded in agreement. “Like a bully puffing up his chest. All show.”
“Really,” said Astor, a very pissed-off devil’s advocate. “What’s the flash PMI?”
“Forty-eight.” Shank responded without taking his eyes off the two traders.
The flash PMI, or purchasing managers’ index, measured economic activity as defined by demand for raw materials and industrial goods. Figures above fifty indicated an expansion of economic activity; below fifty signaled contraction.
A reading of forty-eight spelled catastrophe.
“And GDP is still forecast at nine percent?” said Astor.
“Nine point two, actually,” said Goodchild. “But it’s a sham. Things have only gotten worse since we made our evaluation three months ago.”
“So they put their deputy minister for trade on TV to confirm their policy of allowing the yuan to appreciate to fake us out?”
“No choice,” said Longfellow.
“Yeah, I know,” said Astor. “The cracks are beginning to show.”
“Precisely,” responded Goodchild, as if he were back debating at the Oxford union .
“The only change,” said Longfellow, “is the increased pressure the Treasury Department is putting on the Chinese to revalue.”
Longfellow was a Scot, a graduate of Fettes and St. Paul’s before he took a PhD in astrophysics from Stanford. He was tall and fat, with messy red hair, beady eyes, and a constant sweat that dampened his cheeks and forehead. At some point in his career he’d spent two years in the Chinese hinterlands—Sichuan Province, to be exact—teaching English to schoolchildren (though with his nearly incomprehensible brogue, Astor wondered just what kind of English his students had ended up speaking).
“It appears to be working,” said Astor.
“Not for long,” retorted Longfellow. “It can’t. The Chinese have to devalue.”
“That means telling the U.S. government to go screw itself.”
“Indeed,” said Longfellow.
“We’re betting a boatload of money on that opinion.”
“It’s not an opinion,” blared the Scot. “It’s fact.”
Astor slammed an open palm on the table. The three other men snapped to attention. But when Astor spoke, his voice was a whisper. “We’re down four hundred million bucks,” he said. “That’s the only fact that concerns me.”
China. The Middle Kingdom. In just over thirty years, the country of 1.4 billion inhabitants had undergone the most titanic economic transformation the world had seen since the Japanese had welcomed Commodore Perry to Tokyo Harbor in 1854 and ushered in the Meiji Restoration.