The Dervish House (47 page)

Authors: Ian Mcdonald

BOOK: The Dervish House

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Green Headscarf and Big Hair get up to go to the other room. Necdet calls after them, ‘The djinn, what happens? Are they going to go away eventually?’

Big Hair frowns. ‘Why should you want that?’

The nano fountains up through Adnan’s Sarioğlu’s brain like a representation of the Money Tree, hanging out there in the centre of the trading atrium, sculpted from neurons. This kung-fu of Kemal’s is strong. His sight is brilliant and penetrating; the lights brighter, the colours stronger, his focus clearer. His peripheral vision is diamond sharp, he feels he can see right round the back of his head. He can see a little way into things. Details, geometries, lines of connection and intention are all clear in Adnan’s sight. He hears every sound, every voice, every hum and click all at once, entire and yet specific; with the least flick of concentration he can unpick a conversation from the weave and know without seeing where and who the speaker is. He can hear the plastic click of his swing-badge as he strides to his customary place by the Money Tree. The hot wetsuit smell of money envelops him. This is what Ayşe’s mystics and beloved dervishes experienced when they spoke of the oneness of things. Everything, all at once, connected yet discrete. This is how we are meant to be, at our best and greatest, Adnan understands. The nano is just a different dervish dance.

Element of Air, assist me
. Adnan taps his ceptep and the AI come in a rush that takes his breath away, market windows swooping down out of the high roosts of the Money Tree like starlings, flocking, swirling around him so that in his enhanced vision he walks wrapped in a cloak of shifting information, a living mosaic. The traders in their coloured jackets nod to him, intent on their own businesses, wrapped in their own insulations of information.

Adnan looks up into the canopy of the Money Tree, lifts his hands and the symphony begins. He summons, analyses and flicks away pricing screens. Summon weather: he pulls down three different forecasts from the Ankara, Moscow and Tehran weather centres. Change has always come from the east. The spot markets are juddering, a fractal Brownian motion of tens of thousands of AIs automatically placing and filling orders. The spots have always been the natural home of the speculator; get in, make the money, get out quickly.

‘Right then, let’s go to market,’ Adnan orders his Artificial Intelligences. The Baku Hub opens before him. It’s a beautiful, intricate flower of traders and contracts, derivatives and spots, futures and options and swaps and the dirty menagerie of new financial instruments; micro-futures, blinds, super-straddles, fiscalmancy evolved in quant computers so dark and complex no human understands how it makes money; all folded like the petals of a tulip around Baku’s fruiting heart of pipes and terminals and storage tanks. Istanbul is a barker’s tent, a street hustle by comparison. Baku is where the gas goes down.

‘Ali, my adipose friend.’

‘What does that mean? Fat I bet. Bastard.’ Fat Ali’s English will never be the equal of Adnan’s, and is heavily accented. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Ever seen a car fly, Ali?’

‘What are you on about? What is this nonsense?’

‘I have. Now, I want to sell some gas today. Who’s buying?’

A news AI opens a blinker in Adnan’s peripheral vision. Adnan flicks it to centre and front. The Greek government is readying Athens Emergency Rooms for an influx of the elderly as the Turkish heatwave heads west. When Yunanistan perspires, the Balkans sweat. The migrating storks lead the way. Time to lay out the stall.

‘Ali, one hundred and twenty contracts for Baku Caspian, twenty-four-hour delivery.’ Prices are edging upwards. Adnan opens his hands, creating a window into the Belgrade and Sarajevo exchanges. The value of the big Serbian and Bosnian-Croatian-Slovenian gas companies are placing orders. The Balkans are in the market.

‘They’re with you now.’

Adnan places the contracts. Immediately the bids flow in. He sells quickly to Beogaz the big Belgrade energyco. It’s not the best price. It’s a good opening price for Adnan. The market will adjust to the sudden influx of so much gas. He’ll buy them back through an Ozer SPE, watch the price rise, sell them on again. He’ll sell and resell his gas many times before the closing bell, at each stage extracting value. Turquoise has only just begun.

Two hours into trading and Adnan’s gaming of the spot markets has pushed the price to $450 per thousand cubic metres. It’s getting into the money. Adnan’s jacket is soaked with sweat; the concentration is total. The sleight is to keep Turquoise moving through a whirl of other trades on the spots and the derivatives markets. His feet ache and swell inside his shined shoes. He’s in danger of losing track of time; this shit of Kemal’s is a rough horse to ride. Savant levels of attention coupled with a Sufi’s grasp of the whole pattern. He sees Kemal glance at him nervously through the back office glass. Adnan flicks his head. Do you know that I know? I saved you, man. They would have taken you out of here strapped into a gurney. You owe me but you’ll never know. But the hole is still there, the pit beneath the Money Tree that goes all the way down to Iblis. Throw all of Turquoise in there and watch it flutter like confetti. We must face that. When we’re in the money, that’s when we’ll face it. Everything is easier when you are in the money.

The Balkans are out of the game. The money has moved west. The Hungarians and Italians are placing orders, anticipating heat in the streets of Budapest and Roma. The Vienna Hub, through which Mittel Europa’s gas is sold and distributed, is at four sixty. Adnan’s reading the same meteorology feeds as they are and he knows it can go higher. Four eighty in Vienna. Adnan buys back the Turquoise consignment. Kemal is on his feet behind the glass. He can read the prices on the Money Tree as clearly as Adnan. What he can’t read, what no one else can read, are Adnan’s aggregators; thousands of tiny barely-intelligent bots that crawl the regional news and community networks. All knowledge is local. The market is not some lofty, abstract edifice of pure economic behaviour. At every point it is connected to the world of people and their values. It is made of human hearts and dreams.

The price on the Vienna Hub edges to four ninety-four. The aggregators open a shattered mosaic of windows around Adnan. Ice-cream sales are down in Izmir. In Cappadocia the fruit growers are moving less stock to the cool underground storage caverns carved from yielding tufa. Cocktail of the Day at the Mardan Palace Hotel is the pure white-winter Tsarina’s Pearl. Yesterday it was the Tropical Caipiroshka. The Şaş restaurant in Kaş is taking its tables indoors. Eken Domestic Gas has a two-day wait on deliveries for patio heaters. Turkey has spoken. Foretold by a thousand fingers held up to the wind, weather eyes cast to the horizon, the heat wave is breaking. Perfect information is a rumour, perfect rumour is information. Adnan bows his head, lifts up his hands as if in prayer and banishes the swarming aggregators.

Adnan Sarioğlu offers four hundred and ninety five dollars for ten thousand cubic metres of twenty-hour Caspian on the Vienna Hub. Two seconds later MagyaGaz buys at his price. Adnan sells and bales. Turquoise is sealed. As he turns away, the prices on the Money Tree screens peak at four nine-seven. Then the market learns what Adnan scryed from his hoteliers and fruit growers and cocktail shakers, the people whose livelihoods depend on the weather, and goes into free fall.

Kemal applauds silently through the glass as the figures tumble. Adnan nods.
Book it
. Turquoise isn’t complete yet. He taps up two com screens on his ceptep. One is to Fat Ali, who will arrange delivery from the Baku end. The other is through a remote server on an encrypted channel to Seyamak Larijani. Adnan reads anticipation, excitement, delight, guilt all written on his face.

‘Mr Sarioğlu?’

‘Fire up the pumps,’ Adnan says. As he closes the connection the account expires. Second call is to Oğuz down in the land of pipes.

‘Hail Terrak.’

‘Hail Draksor. So what did we sell for?’ Oğuz asks. Adnan tells him. ‘Fuck yeah!’ says the Ultralord of Earth. He will make the calculations and the flow rates and the transit times and send his little software peris to cause mischief out at Erzurum.

‘There’s something else I need to tell you,’ Adnan says. The rush ends so soon. Truth is, it was not that high a rush. It was nothing compared with the brilliance of the conception, the daring joy of setting up the deal with TabrizGaz, the frustration and ultimate triumph of the hunting of the White Knight. The dramatic climax of Turquoise was the action of a split-second, over before human consciousness could register it, an AI carrying out an order at computer-speed.

Oğuz’s face clouds.

‘You’re alarming me. What have you done?’

‘Not on this line.’

Dead air. Then he sees through the glass Kemal raise his hand to take a new call. Kemal nods, then turns to Adnan out on the trading floor, grins and mouths the name
Oğuz
.

Oğuz is back on the line.

‘You didn’t do it.’ There is a special hissing shriek tone of voice for muted screaming in public. Oğuz has it very well.

‘I said, not on this line. Let’s go down early to the Kebab Prophet. I have a plan. Say about twelve thirty.’

The market has over an hour until close but Adnan has nothing out there that his AIs can’t handle.

‘Fuck. We are so fucked up the ass. Does Kadir know?’

‘I’m about to tell him.’

Kadir’s reaction is more reserved. They have clean asses and mouths up in Oversight and Compliance.

‘You say you have a plan,’ he says in that measured, reasonable tone practised by Compliance managers and security police interrogators. Adnan would hate to be on the end of one of Kadir’s investigations. The bastard knows Adnan doesn’t have a plan. But Adnan can see the beginning of a plan, like a line of light on the horizon.

‘Twelve thirty then, and I’m sure your plan will be brilliant.’

There’s one more call he has to make before he leaves the trading floor, the one that means most to him,

Ayşe’s ceptep goes to message. Adnan should not be surprised but he is disappointed. To have told her while it was still hot on him, that would have been triumph.

‘Hi, love. It’s done. Four nine-five. Start picking interior designers. ’ He takes a breath, feels a shudder in it, partly nervous tension evaporating, partly the come-off — and it will be a terrible one, it’s always bad with new nano — from Kemal’s Horse. ‘Love, let me know if you’re going to be late. I’d really like to see you. You know? Okay. Love you. See you.’

Buy at sixteen dollar fifty. Sell at four hundred and ninety-five. The come-off is starting; evil flashes of another paisley-patterned universe, but he loves it. He fucking loves it.

The white van has been parked on Sidik Sami Omar Cadessi since the early hours. It’s an old Türk Telekom Mercedes Sprinter, the logo painted out but still visible, a corporate ghost. The workmen have erected plastic barriers with red and white chevron warnings to keep pedestrians away from the work. People have become litigious about health and safety since the EU. Mistrustful days. There is a little awning with a seat and a gas-hob for a tea-maker. Men in T-shirts, multi-pocket workpants and hi-vis vests stand around sipping tea and and contemplating the hole they have made in the cobblestones of the Street of the Addicts. A radio burbles Talk Sport. The Galatasaray-Arsenal Cup Tie kicks off at two.

Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant. Mehmet and Ahmet are the Sufi Masters of Blatancy. They’re the guys who would walk into your office and steal your computer away by telling you it needed a warranty service. They’re the guys who will sell your apartment while you’re still living in it. They move things, they store things, they hide things, they source things. They have a pantheon of Greek Gods lifted from classical sites from the Hellespont to Olympos in a warehouse out in Zeytinburnu. They have Alcahöyük antlered bronzes and Hittite hunting reliefs, Byzantine mosaics and Orthodox frescos, Selcuk mihrabs and Tulip Era minbars in some place off the O
₃. They have entire temples, each stone RFID tagged and coded, boxed up and ready for shipping. Ayşe has never contracted them before — her work so far has been too light-weight, too flimsy for these lifters of stones and shifters of sarcophagi — but they are on the speed dial of every antiquarian in Istanbul. They are big bull-headed guys, rolls of fat at their necks, stubble-scalped, built like wrestlers from Edirne. They were wrestlers from Edirne. They’re not quite brothers. They get things shifted.

They set up their van and cordon, erected a fake Türk Telekom sign and nonchalantly prised off the drain cover and scraped it across the cobbles. Barçin Yayla, camouflaged and anonymized in a hi-vis jacket, let out a howl of protest.

‘Who is this?’ Mehmet asked.

‘He’s the last Hurufi,’ Ayşe said. Mehmet and Ahmet looked at each other.

‘Best keep him out of the way.’

Ayşe looked at the hole, the opening, the gateway, the portal.

‘I go first, that’s the deal.’

‘Whoa whoa whoa whoa,’ said Ahmet. ‘First, we have some tea. That’s what’s first.’