Nest of Vipers

Sarah Jensen returned from lunch at two-thirty. She took her seat at her trading desk and studied her four trading screens intently for five minutes. Then she picked up her telephone handset and executed a quick trade, closing out a position. It took thirty seconds. It made half a million pounds. With a smile and a flourish she switched off her screens, gathered up her handbag, and prepared to leave. David Reed, her colleague who sat next to her, looked up in surprise. "You can't leave now. It's just two-thirty." Sarah laughed and blew him a kiss as she headed off. "Watch me." And they did. Half the trading floor followed her progress as she crossed the room and disappeared into the lifts. At twenty-seven, Sarah Jensen had all the trappings of a normal life, albeit at a rarefied level. She was smart and beautiful. She was one of the top foreign-exchange traders in the City of London. She lived in a big house in Chelsea with her brother and her boyfriend. She had looks, love, and money. But she also had fear. The life that she had so carefully constructed was fragile. Just as her childhood in New Orleans had ended one sunny afternoon with the death of her parents, so her new life could end suddenly. In seconds. A glittering impact of steel on skin, an act of violence--there was no rationality or justice to sudden death. The fear never left her. It burrowed deep, it hid itself in distortions, denial, and lies, but it never went away. And its shadow showed in everything she did, from the blithe risk-taking as she staked hundreds of millions of pounds at her trading desk to her careless, casual affairs, to security now with her boyfriend, Eddie, to her whisky and her glorious laughter and her uninhibited enjoyment of life, of the moment. The fragility was, in its own way, strength. Her awareness that everything could be lost in an instant gave her a rich life, well lived. It gave her an edge. She wondered sometimes if anyone suspected, if anyone saw the shadows behind her sunny exterior. No one really knew, she was sure of that. Her two closest friends, Jacob Goldsmith and Mosami Matsumoto, might have glimpsed the hidden side, the fear and the risk-taking it engendered, but they never discussed it, never went beyond the image Sarah had created for the world. They knew something else was there, but they knew to leave it alone. The money screamed across the wires, its provenance fading in a maze of electronic transfers that shifted it, hid it, broke it up into manageable wads, which would be withdrawn and redeposited elsewhere, obliterating the trail. Antonio Fieri, the mastermind of dollars' worth. How far would they stretch end to end? he wondered. Rome to New York in tenners? He laughed, eased out of his chair, and waddled over to the fridge in the corner of his office. Four hundred million dollars in ten months. He poured himself a glass of champagne and drank to easy money. Had Fieri known where his paper trail led, the champagne would have turned to bile in his mouth. On a sweaty trading floor in a merchant bank in the financial district of London, known as the City, a young foreign-exchange trader put down his telephone, resisting the urge to whoop with delight. Another $3 million for the numbered account. And a quarter share for him. It was becoming a bit of a problem, he thought, laugLinda Davies is the author of 'Nest of Vipers', published 1995 under ISBN 9780440221906 and ISBN 0440221900.