Previews

Find out why they call this man The Mink:

[from Chapter 8]

At another investment firm in a different city, a man paced in front of his corner office window.  He touched a hand to his long stringy black hair larded up with gel and felt the familiar hardness all around for the helmet it was.  For the shiny helmet, for his ferret-like appearance and for his ability to slither into and out of the murky waters of gray market finance virtually unnoticed, he was called the Mink.  As he looked back to his desk the phone lit up noiselessly, signaling an incoming call.  Noting the caller ID, the man snapped it up.  “What?”

“I was told you called,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“I called your office three hours ago.  Is this how you treat one of your biggest investors?”

“I’m a little busy today, running the world’s largest producer of fiberglass.”

“You can’t be working that hard today,” the Mink said.  “Your limp stock is only up a penny since the opening bell on about,” he glanced at one of the many monitors lining his control room, “thirty trades.”  Contempt dripped from his lips.

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Robert Nielsen, government agent and nemesis:

[from Chapter 17]

Back across the Atlantic, or the Pacific depending on perspective, Robert Nielsen stood on the threshold of another wasted day. Nielsen was wrong to put so much hope on one horse. He should have learned by now but he needed a diversion, something to take his mind off of reality once in a while. His reality had included dreams of enlisting to become an elite soldier, only to be dashed by a medically disqualifying pes planus, also known as flat feet. After that, a position in the FBI half of the Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force seemed a natural fit for him, but his college grades hadn’t matched his efforts. Since the accounting degree became unattainable, he settled for marketing. After a stint in the private sector, he found the pace of government work more suitable and, for the last thirteen years, had occupied a position in a mid-level department assigned to investigate ephemeral crimes against an opaque criminal code.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be this way,’ he thought. That feisty mare, jumpy and restless in the warm-up, came out like a frickin’ lard ass in the last race of the day, finishing second-to-last. He pulled a stack of tickets out of the pocket of his worn gray windbreaker and reviewed his losses, flicking each one back with a battered thumbnail discolored by smoke and stress. First race, he put $100 on the smallest horse. At 3:1 odds, that win was his first and last of the day. Shoulda stopped there, he thought. Shit. Overconfident, he threw away $900 on the next six races, on horses that didn’t even place.
Not that he really had the money to play. Except for his government job and pension, he didn’t have much. Just an old house with faded siding, a broken A/C unit he couldn’t afford to fix, and, the man scowled, nothing but a jar of strawberry jelly in the goddamned fridge.

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Justin Lowe on growing up:

[from Chapter 9]

…No chance of working in Boston again.  That was okay.  Moving on was a way of life for him.  The child of parents in the Foreign Service, he spent his grade school years in places ranging from first-rate cities like Helsinki and Berlin to the second world of Russian-occupied Estonia and Kiev, all the way down the totem pole to New Delhi and, worst of all, an eighteen-month stint in Ouagadougou.  That one was the worst.  That one had broken the family.

His mother couldn’t take it anymore.  They had spent their days cowering in their three-room, all-tile apartment in a four-story high rise that constituted Burkina Faso’s tallest building.  Between the cockroaches visiting at night and the piles of water buffalo shit peppering the city streets, there was no room for civilization.  No weekends spent at an indoor mall, no evenings watching first-run movies in air-conditioned theaters.  Just sweating his nuts off, trying to hurry past hanging pig faces at the local market without vomiting.  His mom broke down and demanded out – out of the country and out of the marriage.

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Interested in securities analysis? Let Justin Lowe give you a guided tour:

[from Chapter 18]

Justin scratched his head as he pondered the next challenge. Despite its complexity, securities analysis could be applied to any business, in any environment. All it involved was assigning a value to a particular organization, then dividing that amount by the number of shares outstanding. Assigning the value, though, was the hard part. At its most basic, it involved distilling the sum of the subject company’s cash flows down to a single point in time, usually called time zero and often meaning ‘now’ in plain English. All inflows, as far into the future as could be seen, had to be estimated then discounted back to the present at some assumed interest rate, which could itself be based on many different things. All outflows, which were more predictable yet absolutely not certain, likewise had to be discounted to the present. The difference between the two was a current value representing the company’s future profits. Then he just had to add in the value of the rest of the company’s tangible assets, like office equipment, buildings, real estate and machinery, all the way down to the fuel in the company’s trucks and the soda in its cafeteria.

This too, while daunting, was certainly doable. The only other items to value were a company’s intangible assets including things like goodwill, which is the unseen value of its brand, for instance, or capacity to come up with new patents, intellectual property, and so on. The tools in Justin’s kit included industry-standard ratios, benchmarks, things to enable realistic comparisons to other companies whose values were more-or-less known. This process leaned a great deal on accurate reporting by the subject company and a general air of transparency – transparency enforced in the form of regular financial statements by the authority of the respective country’s government, and audited regularly to ensure compliance. Even when these conditions were met, like in the West, scores of analysts tracking a single company might not foresee the same stock price.

And when none of these conditions are met, it’s necessary to start from scratch. Like how Justin found himself now, looking out the window at the bleak countryside surrounding Moscow.

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I’d like you to meet Justin Lowe. The following is an excerpt from LIONS,  my debut thriller.

Chapter 1

Justin Lowe gripped the chrome bar running the length of the commuter rail car with an iron ferocity. Today’s news heralding the buyout of his employer, Solomon Wittenberg Asset Management LLC, dripped all over the front page. Justin felt his stomach churn and pinpricks of sweat dot his upper lip as he absorbed the unexpected news like a sucker punch. That he had to read it along with the general public was a slap in the face.

For Solomon, a mutual fund mainstay since its inception in the colonial era, it would surely be the death knell for a firm that had sailed through every major event in the country’s history, from its very founding to the Civil War to Black Monday and on through decades of a confiscatory Congress.

No doubt the sour mood of despair would permeate every-thing at work. Justin had the shortest tenure of anyone on the International Equity team, and though at twenty-six he was the youngest, he had enough experience to know that people would be spooked. Rumors would stomp around unbridled and poop all over the floor.

And on top of all that, there was an extremely loud man on the train, spoiling the morning quiet.

Justin looked up. He studied the man up ahead speaking loudly into his cell phone. Something was called for. Though the breach of peace was bad enough on the tensely packed car, the man was plainly ignoring a very pregnant woman who had gotten on at the last stop. She clutched the seat handle as she stood in the aisle along with perhaps ten others waiting their turn to catch a vacant place. Though there were only four stations left, Justin knew that more seats wouldn’t open up until the stop at Back Bay, twenty minutes away.

He started to make his way to the front, where the offending mouth was. As he approached, he excused himself as he stepped from side to side between bodies. Justin slowed his pace as the click-clacking became less frequent, and reached the man just as the train slowed to pull in at the next station.

“Excuse me, sir?” Through the ambient noise of dozens of pairs of feet shuffling around, the wheels braking and newspapers folding, the man on the phone managed to hear Justin.

The loud talker spun around. “Hang on one second, Martin,” he said into his phone. He lifted his head vaguely at Justin. “What?” he snapped.

“Are you getting off here?” Justin asked.

“No.” The man just as quickly swiveled around, his back to Justin, and continued talking. As the train stopped, Justin plucked the phone out of the man’s hand, like a casino dealer picking one card out of the middle of the deck. He flicked his wrist, sending the phone out the open door and onto the plat-form, skidding amongst hundreds of walking feet.

“You are now.”

The man reddened, but the motion of the train starting prompted him to run out the door in search of his device. Justin turned to the pregnant woman. “Looks like this one is open.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”