"Va te faire foutre, connard!!"

A high-rise office on the main street of Wall Street. The fifty-fifth floor.

Robert d'Artois, a French nobleman, had been glaring at his monitor, and the filth came pouring out of him.

That sly, filthy son of a fox!

Natural gas, and somebody had walked off with it again.

"Dammit……."

Robert's eyes were past cold. They were murderous.

"Just how far ahead is he seeing……."

He ground his teeth.

August. A short, opened up near the high. Hard rallies came through more than once on the way down, and it never flinched.

Then October. With the low right under its nose.

The position had come off with no regrets at all.

The problem was what it had made.

"If it's this much……."

Robert ran fast through the trade records. Size on entry. Average price. The moment it closed out.

He put the leverage in, and the estimated profit came up on the screen. He read the number, and Robert's face was a face like a funeral.

"Insane……."

This was not somebody getting the timing right once by luck. He had taken it at the top and ridden it almost the whole way to the floor.

So where had this money slipped away to this time?

Robert threw everything he had at running the flow backward.

The Caymans. Luxembourg. Hong Kong. Singapore. And more.

Entity tangled into entity, custodian account into custodian account.

But the route ended there.

He never did find what stood behind the overseas investment account.

One entity had another in its teeth. Behind the custodian banks, private equity funds and trusts were layered one over the next.

Peel one skin off and there was another skin.

The whole thing looked built by somebody who had known from the start that he would be followed.

"Goddamn it……."

Robert ground his teeth.

But unwinding the natural gas short had opened a small gap, and it was the first one he had ever found.

His hand stopped on the mouse.

"……Korea."

This money wasn't wired straight to the overseas investment account.

A completely different route.