Michael Ridpath
The Predator
For my mother, Elizabeth, who liked to read
Part One
Chris pulled the yellow note off his favourite coffee mug and read the familiar loopy writing: Gone to Prague. Back Wednesday. Maybe. Love L.
He sighed and shook his head. It was Monday morning, the first day back after ten glorious days skiing in the French Alps. He had been in the office since half past seven, refreshed, eager to sort out whatever tangles Lenka had made of their firm while he had been away. As he had expected, there were quite a few. The computer was down, there was a letter from the fund’s auditors about a problem with the accounting of accrued interest, and she had bought a pile of bonds issued by an extremely dodgy-sounding Polish mobile telecoms company.
And now there was this note.
She knew he would be angry. She must have left it on his mug in the kitchen so that he would have a few minutes to settle in before he found it. How thoughtful. She could at least have stayed a day in London to brief him on what had happened since he had been away. This was the first holiday he had taken since he and Lenka had set up Carpathian Fund Management the previous year and he had expected things to fall apart without him. But, as he closed his eyes and remembered the feel of the fresh crisp powder under his skis, he knew it had been worth it.
The phone rang. He carried the mug of coffee back to his desk and picked it up.
‘Carpathian.’
‘Good morning, Chris! How’s your tan?’ He recognized the hoarse, exuberant voice immediately.
‘Lenka! Where are you?’
‘Didn’t you get my note? I’m in Prague.’
‘Yes. But what are you doing there? You should be here, telling me what’s been going on.’
‘You’re a clever boy, Chris. You’ll figure it out. Anyway, I’ve got some great news. I’ve found us an office!’
‘In Prague?’
‘Yes, of course in Prague. Remember, we discussed it?’
It was true. They had discussed gradually opening up small offices throughout Central Europe. But not quite yet, Chris had thought. The idea of all the admin involved in opening and running one made his heart sink.
‘What’s the matter, Chris? It’s in a great location. And I think I’ve found the right person to run it. Jan Pavlík. You’ll like him. Come over and have a look.’
‘When? How can I do that? There’s too much to do here.’
‘It’ll wait,’ said Lenka. ‘This is important. And we have to move fast to get this office. Come on. I don’t want to take these decisions without you.’
It seemed to Chris that that was exactly what she was doing.
‘But what about the computer? And what on earth are we doing with twenty-five million euros of Eureka Telecom?’
‘Don’t worry. Ollie has got a man coming in this morning to fix the computer. And I’ll tell you all about Eureka Telecom when you get here. There’s a story.’
‘There’d better be,’ he said.
‘Oh, Chris, you sound so fierce,’ Lenka said in mock awe. ‘Look, the office is right across the street from the Golden Bear. It’s a great pub. It serves Budvar. You’ll like it, I promise.’
He hesitated. He glanced out of the window at the upper branches of the oak trees reaching up from the square below. The din of London traffic drifted up to the fifth-floor office, pierced by the cries of a taxi driver hurling abuse at a bicycle courier. It was true, they had promised their investors that they would open up in Central Europe. They had said it was essential to have a local presence to understand the market properly. Well, it was about time they did something about it.
‘Oh come on, Chris,’ Lenka said. ‘If you want to give me a hard time about it, you can do it here.’
As usual, Lenka was getting her way.
‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘See you tonight.’
The taxi nosed through the cars parked haphazardly in the small snow-covered square and pulled up in front of the Hotel Paříž. Chris paid the driver and checked in. He called up to Lenka’s room; she told him she would meet him in the lobby in ten minutes. It took him less than that to dump his case, change into some jeans and get back downstairs.
Lenka, of course, made him wait. The lobby was dripping with accoutrements from the beginning of the twentieth century: ornate chandeliers and elevator doors made of brass, a Rodin-like sculpture of a nude, and art-nouveau posters advertising everything from Czech chocolate to French plays. Lenka always stayed in the Hotel Paříž; she said it was one of the few hotels in the city that still had style. She had grown up thirty kilometres from Prague, and she had spent her student days there. She loved it. Chris wasn’t at all surprised that she wanted to open an office there.
And Chris wasn’t going to stop her. Although technically they were equal partners in Carpathian Fund Management, the fund had been her idea, and he still considered himself lucky that she had asked him to join her. They had first met ten years before, when they were both eager participants on the training programme of Bloomfield Weiss, a large New York investment bank. They had become friends and had kept in touch as they went their separate ways: he to Bloomfield Weiss’s London office and she to their Emerging Markets group in New York. Then, when he was holed up alone in his flat recovering from a stomach bug he had picked up in India, fired in disgrace from his job, abandoned by his girlfriend, his self-confidence demolished, she had called him. She was leaving Bloomfield Weiss to set up her own fund. Would he like to join her?
She had saved him. Of course, he had refused her offer at first, saying he was the wrong person, that he would be a hindrance rather than a help. He had believed this, but she had not. With her encouragement, he pieced together the fragments of his shattered self-esteem. It turned out she was right: they made a good team.
Carpathian was a hedge fund investing in the government and high-yield bonds of Central Europe. Or at least that was the way they had described it in their marketing literature. In reality, ‘hedge fund’ meant high risk, ‘high-yield’ meant junk bonds, and Central Europe meant the old Eastern Europe less the basket cases, like Russia. The investors knew what they were doing, though. They wanted to make as much money as possible from the integration of the old Iron Curtain countries with the rest of Europe. They wanted Lenka and Chris to take big risks, and make them big bucks, or to be more precise, big euros. Lenka, with some help from Chris, had raised fifty-five million euros, and borrowed more to maximize the return on investment.
So far, all had gone well. They had achieved a return of twenty-nine per cent in their first nine months; in January alone they had made six per cent. Chris had been a trader long enough to know that some of their success was down to luck. But he knew how to trade government bonds well and she knew the high-yield market. She had the vision to see the big play; he got the details right. She wowed their investors; he made sure they received high-quality reports on time. She had found the office in Hanover Square at a bargain rent; he had negotiated the lease. And now she had found an office in Prague, the first step towards making them a truly European fund manager.
But Chris knew from painful experience that in the bond markets things could change in an instant. His skiing holiday was the first time in over a year that, for a few short days, he had not been worrying about Carpathian. Now he was worrying again.
Ollie, their young analyst, could sort the computer out. He and Tina, an even younger receptionist-cum-assistant, would cope for a couple of days. But a bigger concern was the Eureka Telecom holding. Twenty-five million euros was a large position for a fund of Carpathian’s size. Chris knew little about Eureka Telecom, except that it intended to build a mobile telephone network across Central Europe, and that the bond had been issued during the week he was skiing. Bloomfield Weiss, his old employer, was the lead manager. He couldn’t help it, but he still found it hard to trust any bond issue that was led by them.