The Island--A Thriller

by Ben Coes

  The wheels were in motion. The questions had already been asked and answered.

  Move when you feel the explosions.

  Mansour stared at the map, lost in thought. Then he opened up a blueprint of the United Nations. Four X marks represented where men were already prepositioned, armed with MANPADs, shoulder-fired missiles. Two soldiers were in buildings on the western side of First Avenue with a direct firing line at the UN.

  “Excuse me, Commander,” said one of the men.

  “What is it?” said Mansour.

  “The Federal Reserve,” he said. “It is imperative you get the men moving now.”

  Mansour nodded.

  He picked up his cell and dialed. After a few rings, a voice came on.

  “Yes.”

  “It has begun,” said Mansour. “Call the others. The operation is now live. You’re now operational. Remember about being subtle. Yours is the only part that must be subtle. It is why you were chosen.”

  “Yes, sir, Commander,” came a young voice. “We will do what we’ve been trained for, we will do it quietly, and then we will meet Rokan with the fruits of our victorious efforts.”

  20

  5:57 A.M.

  METRO-NORTH TRAIN STATION

  MT. KISCO, NEW YORK

  A silver BMW M5 pulled into the parking lot of a suburban train station, outside New York City. The lot was already crowded, even now, at just before six on a Wednesday morning. Men and women taking the early train to get to the city and their jobs at large financial institutions, hedge funds, PR firms, publishers, media conglomerates, and a thousand other high-paying professions which kept the train crowded on a Wednesday morning. Everyone trying to get ahead—or stay ahead. Of course, the ones who were already ahead, far ahead, could show up whenever they wanted to.

  Phil Lawrence was already far, far ahead, though he didn’t show it, at least not ostentatiously. He first retired at age thirty-four, though now, at forty-eight, that year of retirement was hard to remember. He and his wife had traveled the world, staying in the finest hotels and resorts, visiting the South Pole and Tibet, and more than twenty other countries in between. His fraternity brothers at Saint Anthony Hall had not anticipated Lawrence’s success. After all, he’d graduated from Columbia, where his academic record had been mediocre at best. At St. A’s, he was known for his pool-shooting skills and his ability to attract women. After graduation, Lawrence had asked his father for a $100,000 loan, all of which he’d invested in a cross section of oil companies at every part of the supply chain, along with a mirror-image investment across the emerging biotech industry. By the time he was twenty-five, he’d paid his father back and had almost $70 million under management, most of it his own. When his father and a few friends were allowed to invest, Lawrence—by thirty—was running $8 billion, $6 billion of which was based on capital appreciation, rather than new investors. Lawrence made approximately 20 percent of all capital appreciation.

  Lawrence had been approached by a multitude of hedge funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and family offices. All wanted to acquire his fund. He contemplated a few offers to come aboard, with total investment freedom, and autonomy over a much bigger piece of capital. But Lawrence knew that if he worked for someone he would have to explain how he saw the patterns in the numbers, how he could look at tens of thousands of documents quickly, not really reading them—raw financials—and somehow process the blur of numbers and see patterns which told him something.

  He sold his company to Black Rock when he turned thirty-four. He was already a billionaire and this just added to it. After his year of travel, he couldn’t take it anymore. He hated being retired. Lawrence couldn’t handle not putting himself in the middle of the complex, massively simultaneous data flow of the economy. He realized during that year that it wasn’t about the money.

  He repeated what he’d done as a younger man—starting with $100,000, which he again, for symbolic reasons, borrowed from his father. Again, he repaid the money and within a calendar year had turned that initial investment into $220 million.

  It was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard Baum, who called Lawrence and recruited him.

  “Have you ever heard of the governors of the Federal Reserve?” said Baum.

  “No,” said Lawrence.

  “The four Fed governors manage the actual day-to-day, minute-by-minute trading platform for U.S. Treasury securities,” said Baum. “It’s called Fedwire. Basically, the financial transactions of the United States government run through the four governors. During any single day, that amounts to almost three hundred billion, in a year over one hundred trillion dollars of activity. I’m calling you, Phillip, because I’d like to ask you to be one of the governors.”

  * * *

  On the radio was sports talk, a NYC station. Mike Francesa was both praising and excoriating Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, for something. Lawrence was laughing as he parked his car and hit a button on the console, turning it off.

  It was his usual space, the corner of the lot nearest the train tracks, the spot he parked in every day.

  He did notice a shadow as he turned off the car but didn’t think anything of it. Had he been watching, he would have seen a dark figure move to the left rear of the M5 as he parked.

  Lawrence opened the door but before he could begin to step out of the car, a long black suppressor appeared in the opening of the door. Behind it was a man in a ski mask. The man pumped the trigger. There was a low metallic thwack. A suppressed, hollow-tipped bullet ripped through Lawrence’s throat. Another thwack and this time the metal tore dead center into Lawrence’s chest, shooting blood across the far window.

  The man tossed the pistol onto the ground. He lifted Lawrence and threw him to the passenger seat and climbed in, shutting the car door behind him. He pulled off the ski mask and took a plastic bag out of his pocket. He grabbed Lawrence’s right arm, finding his hand, then his thumb. He removed a set of steel wire clippers, quickly grabbing the base of Lawrence’s thumb. He squeezed as hard as he could, twisting the clippers so the blades dug in. Blood poured all over the center console of the car. The killer cut the thumb off at the joint.

  He tossed the wire cutters to the floor and pulled a small blade from his coat. He inserted the tip of the blade next to the dead man’s eye, along the edge of the orbital socket. Like plumbing an oyster, he scooped the eyeball out, cutting veins, then stuck both the finger and the eye into the plastic bag, which he put in his coat pocket. He looked around the parking lot and climbed out and shut the door to the BMW, then moved to the train platform, just as the 6:06 to Grand Central Station came rolling into Mt. Kisco.

  21

  6:10 A.M.

  PARK SLOPE

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  David Fenner stepped down the front steps of a brick town house just as his wife, Natalie, was coming back from a run.

  Fenner had short, tight-cropped brown hair and a laid-back demeanor. He had on a tan corduroy suit, a white button-down, and no tie.

  A black sedan—Fenner’s Uber—was waiting at the curb.

  “How far did you go?” he said to Natalie.

  Natalie stopped and leaned forward.

  “Seven,” she said.

  “Good for you.”

  “What did you do?” she said.

  “Five,” said Fenner, walking closer and reaching for her, despite her sweatiness. He embraced her. “I love you, honey. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “I love you, too. Seven o’clock,” said Natalie, standing up. “Please don’t be late.”

  “I won’t.”

  Fenner walked toward the black sedan.

  He glanced back at his wife as she ascended the wide steps of their brownstone. The home had cost him $6 million, followed by a $4 million restoration. There was no doubt it was one of the most beautiful brownstones in Park Slope. The money didn’t matter, though. The Fenners were wealthy.

  As a student at Babson College, he�
��d written a computer program that could be used to be the back end of any online gambling site. By the time he was a junior, it was the back end of most online gambling sites, and he sold the code for $120 million the fall of his senior year. In graduate school at MIT, Fenner wrote two computer programs, both of which he sold for a lot of money.

  Fenner, like the other three governors of the Fed, was already wealthy before he agreed to help manage the very system upon which their wealth had been created, a system on which America’s money moved in a complex paradigm of black boxes, wires, and air. Fenner, and the other governors, each earned $289,500 a year.

  * * *

  As Fenner looked at his wife stepping up the stairs, he thought about how much he’d accomplished, and a feeling of pride and happiness filled him for a brief moment as he opened the back door of the black Cadillac sedan. He climbed in just as a dark figure, looming inside, turned from the front seat. Fenner saw the gun just as the stranger turned. It was a silencer, he understood that. The man was wearing a black ski mask. Before Fenner’s momentum had even carried him to the leather back seat, the man fired. There was a low thud. A bullet hit him in the chest and splattered blood across the seat and door.

  The killer pulled the door shut and started driving. He went for several blocks and parked near a subway station. He took out a small plastic bag, then a pair of wire cutters, and cut off Fenner’s thumb. He put it in the bag, then stuck the tip of a knife into Fenner’s eye socket. He pried out the eyeball, taking it gently into his hand as his other hand slashed the blade through what was left of the veins connecting Fenner’s eyeball to his skull. He put the eyeball in the plastic bag.

  The killer climbed out of the car and walked to the subway station, falling in line with the swarm of human beings on their daily commute to Manhattan.

  22

  6:12 A.M.

  THE QUINN

  197 VAN VORST STREET

  JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY

  Ali awoke at 6 A.M. without the need for his alarm clock. He found the text and read it again:

  Sale of Victory 8:25 am when clouds appear

  For Ali, his time in the United States had been brief, less than a year. He’d come in through California, on a student visa, to study at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His application had been a lie. Ali was twenty-four years old and had stopped going to school at fifteen after volunteering for Hezbollah.

  Ali’s role—like hundreds of other volunteers—was straightforward. Upon the signal, he was to do his duty.

  Any soldier selected was to be forever commemorated by Suleiman. Just to be selected was a great honor. Active shooter. All were from Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthi, and Canadian Jihad.

  Ali carried a large duffel bag to his Toyota Highlander, which was parked in a belowground garage a few blocks away from his apartment building. The Highlander was black and shiny. Ali kept it spotless. He had to. It was part of the agreement with Uber. In a strange way, he was proud of his time driving for Uber. He had a rating from his customers of 4.97. He’d saved most of his money.

  Ali knew he might not survive today. He had already arranged to wire his remaining money to his father. He opened the rear and felt for the automatic rifle hidden near a spare tire. He shut the back, climbed in the driver’s seat, and headed for Manhattan.

  23

  6:18 A.M.

  AIR FORCE ONE

  ABOVE THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

  Air Force One took off from Joint Base Andrews at just after six o’clock in the morning. A similar-looking plane took off six minutes later. Only one of the identical jets held the president, J. P. Dellenbaugh.

  The back of Air Force One was filled with members of the White House press corps. The front of the plane, separated from the press by a secured doorway, was only half full. The cabin was luxurious, though its purpose was purely business. In addition to several rows of large, comfortable leather captain’s chairs were four conference tables, each table having two chairs on either side. President J. P. Dellenbaugh sat at a table nearest to the front of the plane, alone. Seated in the back were six Secret Service agents and a small phalanx of presidential aides. At another conference table sat Secretary of State Bailey Miller and National Security Advisor Josh Brubaker. Another table was occupied by White House Director of Communications John Schmidt, and head speechwriter Cory Tilley.

  Each big Boeing was flanked by a pair of F-18/As, each of which, on approach, curled in a trained, tight arc above the miles and acreage surrounding the airports, searching—with eyes and technology—for the telltale flash of enemy fire. It never came, at least not yet, but these pilots were trained to stop the one time when someone did try to take down the president of the United States while flying on Air Force One.

  “This speech is going to piss off the Iranians, piss off our allies, piss off the Chinese, piss off the Russians, and pretty much piss off everyone else,” said Dellenbaugh.

  “You asked me to write a speech that reflects your worldview, sir,” said Tilley. “Did I get anything wrong?”

  The occasion was the president’s annual address to the United Nations General Assembly. Dellenbaugh was to deliver the speech at 11 A.M., in front of government officials, delegates, and diplomats from across the world.

  It was Dellenbaugh’s and the CIA’s belief, and the belief at the highest levels of the Pentagon and National Security Directorate, that the UN had become a vessel for terror; not a direct funder but a helpful piece of architecture through which terrorists could infiltrate the U.S. In addition, it galled Dellenbaugh that some young family in Nebraska had to help foot the bill for something that enabled America’s enemies to enter the country and conduct business against the U.S. on U.S. soil.

  Dellenbaugh smiled at Tilley.

  “That’s precisely what you did, Cory,” said the president. “You know you’re doing something right when you make everyone mad at you. At least everyone who’s not a resident of the United States. We have bridges that are falling down in towns that are filled with teenagers addicted to opioids. Schools that are unsafe, forty thousand homeless veterans. It’s time to put the world on notice: we need to take care of our own.”

  John Schmidt cleared his voice and looked at the president.

  “They’re going to call you an isolationist,” said Schmidt. “America first, fuck the world.”

  “And your job, our job,” said Dellenbaugh, “is to explain that what others see as isolationism, or selfishness, disengagement from the world, is simply a country that needs to take care of its own.”

  “Mr. President, you know I agree with every statement in that speech,” said Schmidt, “but what I don’t understand is why we need to announce that we’re pulling back now. Why not wait until after the election? You’re leading in every poll, so why introduce an external factor which could have unintended consequences?”

  “I know how you feel about this, John,” said the president. “I agree, the timing isn’t ideal. But when will it be?”

  24

  6:30 A.M.

  RIVERSIDE DRIVE AND 108TH STREET

  NEW YORK CITY

  Adam Jaklitsch was up by 5 A.M., as usual. Nevertheless, he had a few hours until he needed to be at the office. He sat in front of a computer, studying what was happening in Asia and Europe. Jaklitsch was not looking at publicly available information. In fact, few human beings on earth would be able to comprehend what he was looking at. It was a black screen with four quadrants, and in each one a series of numbers and letters moved slowly up the screen. This wasn’t information about some company’s stock price, nor even the current price of a country’s currency. Jaklitsch was watching, in real time, the digital flow of funds from the largest banks, companies, and governments in the world in interaction with the United States Federal Reserve, moving along patterns he himself had executed. He was looking at the movement of money in its basest and most elemental format. He wasn’t trying to make money. Jaklitsch was one of
four people making sure money was even there in the first place.

  Liquidity was a measure of readily accessible wealth. It could be in the form of cash, or savings, or assets that could be sold within a few hours.

  For an individual, liquidity would include savings and checking accounts, stocks that could be easily sold, but it would not include other assets, such as a home or an IRA.

  Liquidity was not a measure of overall wealth; in fact it was somewhat unrelated. An individual might have $50,000 in cash in a suitcase, but owe $200,000. This individual’s liquidity would be $50,000, but net worth would be negative $150,000. Liquidity was important, however; oftentimes more important than net worth. Cash was king, and Jaklitsch and his three coworkers managed the actual financial transactions—mostly loans—that fueled the world economy.

  America’s liquidity was estimated to be—at any one time—$4.5 to $5 trillion. Of that amount, less than 5 percent existed in physical cash and gold. Almost all of it—more than $4 trillion—was kept in a foundational, highly complex infrastructure built upon a massively secure, single-purpose digital framework, which enabled the transmission and protection of America’s sovereign wealth itself, in its basic form. A system of credits written in a computer language that was agnostic. This was the digital bank account by which America served as the foundation of the international economy. It was called Fedwire.

  Immediately, Jaklitsch saw that there was a need for an injection of $10 billion to Bank of America, and he also saw that it would be repaid in less than an hour. This was one of but fifty such interactions the Fed would take this coming day, in essence allowing Bank of America to borrow from the digital foundation of America’s currency and pay it back, all without the need for cash and other physical representations of such, such as gold.

  Jaklitsch shut down the computer and looked around his apartment. He lived on Riverside Drive and 108th Street, in a two-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of a beautiful old limestone building just down the street from Columbia University. He had a view of the Hudson River. He watched early-morning joggers moving in both directions through Riverside Park.