by Drew Chapman
Garrett watched it unfold in astonishment. He noticed that he felt flashes of pleasure at the sight of all that chaos. An angry little boy was still inside his head, a boy who took great joy in throwing things and breaking things and smashing the world into tiny bits. He wondered if Ilya Markov had a similar boy inside his brain. Garrett suspected that Ilya did. The link between the two of them was growing in Garrett’s mind, the pattern of their relationship twisting together like the fibrous strands of a rope, becoming more and more tangled, more and more complicated. Garrett wondered if Markov, out there somewhere, could feel it as well. He wondered how Markov felt about him. He wondered and was scared.
Chaudry monitored the proceedings by calling agents in the field, and Alexis did the same, but in her case she called Washington, DC. They both yelled out periodic updates to the room, one-upping each other in what they had gleaned from their sources. Garrett thought it was amusing that the two of them were having some kind of bureaucratic intelligence showdown—who could master the data world faster and better. Of course, Garrett had more information at his fingertips than either of them, but he wasn’t going to say anything. He had another thought—maybe the two of them weren’t tussling over power. Perhaps they were fighting over him.
Garrett thought that would be amusing as well, if it were true, but he suspected it was more personal fantasy than objective reality, and he didn’t have time to analyze the idea deeply. He and the rest of the team were too busy sorting through the crowdsourced answers that they had asked for on the Web. The results had been informative—inspiring even—as well as occasionally idiotic. More than 160,000 responses were on Reddit alone, with another 25,000 appearing on the hastily constructed website that Mitty had launched three hours earlier.
“I’m getting a lot of ‘assassinate the president’ ideas,” Mitty called out from her computer.
“Same,” Patmore said. “And ‘bomb Congress.’ ”
“Discard them,” Garrett said. “Out of hand. As well as anything else that falls too far outside the bell curve of the probability density function. It has to be doable.”
Celeste called out to the group, “There’s a lot of bank-related hits. Trying to make a bank run happen.”
“But how do you do that?” Garrett asked.
Celeste scrolled through her screen. “Twenty-five percent mention the ATM hack.”
“Original,” Garrett said. “Given that it’s already happened.”
“Fourteen percent say shoot the bank CEO. Seven percent say start rumors about collapse.”
Bingo called out from his laptop, “I get twenty percent suggesting we devalue the American dollar.”
“They give any suggestions on how to do that?” Garrett said. “Because I could make a shitload of money with that information.”
It became clear right away that exploding a truck in the middle of the George Washington Bridge was not an original idea: 6,447 other people had thought enough of the idea to post it online. That was an encouraging sign; it meant they were on the right track. Garrett began to see something, a slender reed of a pattern, a line of reasoning that kept cropping up from the most technical postings, the people who seemed to understand the finance business better than any of the others. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself, but then realized that was the beauty of crowdsourcing: you didn’t have to think of everything. Others were there to do the work for you.
For a moment, the IPO stock Crowd Analytics flashed into his thoughts. Had there been more movement on that equity? Had the money in the dark pool struck again? He checked it and found that the stock had moved in lockstep with the broader market, and that direction was down, but not independently down. But the idea spun in his head: How was Crowd Analytics involved? He went back to Reddit. People who seemed to know finance kept pointing to one institution, and one person, and it wasn’t Crowd Analytics. In their minds, power and size were not a good thing: they were the opposite. They were a vulnerability, and Garrett agreed.
“I think I know what he’s going to do,” Garrett said.
“Okay, tell me,” Chaudry said quickly. “If we’re going to plan an action, I need to know now. The field office is stretched thin. Almost every agent is out in the field.”
“Not you.” Garrett shook his head. “You’re not the one who needs to know.”
“I absolutely need to know,” Chaudry said, louder. She shot a look to Alexis, who started across the room toward Garrett.
“Too big to fail,” Garrett said. “We tell the man who’s too big to fail.”
• • •
Robert Andrew Wells Jr., the president and CEO of Vanderbilt Frink, called his wife from the office, told her to pack a bag for herself, one for him, and two for the kids. He told her to pack up as much nonperishable food from the cupboards as she thought would fit in the back of their town car, and when she asked him why, he said it was “to be on the safe side.”
“Is this about the truck crash on the bridge? And the food riots?”
“No. Well, maybe. Just a precaution. And there’s no food riots. Just people overreacting. Either way, I just would prefer to have you guys at the country house. I’ve arranged for a helicopter at the Thirty-Fourth Street heliport. I’ll try to make it out by the end of the day. Maybe tomorrow morning.”
Wells had seven acres of land on the beach in the Hamptons, with a sprawling house and garage, tucked away from the main road and fenced for extra security. When he and his family stayed there, Wells contracted a private security firm to protect the grounds, figuring you could never be too careful when you were as rich as he was.
He hung up with his wife and made final preparations for the press conference. It was lights-on in half an hour. His staff had already drawn up a statement on the current stability of Vanderbilt Frink, and a list of talking points for any gotcha questions the journalists shouted. He would try to project confidence and calm and give off an aura of future prosperity, but he knew the media would jump all over him. They would say or write anything to take him down, would have no problem blaming him for the current state of the economy. That was what the media did to rich people.
Wells texted his driver to meet him at the building’s side entrance in four minutes, then met his bodyguard, Dov, at the elevators.
Wells’s executive assistant, Thomason, was already at his side, whispering a litany of updates into his ear on the current news and state of the economy. “Police haven’t pinpointed the cause of the crash yet, not ruling out terrorism, the bridge is closed, all traffic into and out of Manhattan is snarled.”
“You contracted the chopper for Sally and the kids?”
“Fueled and ready.” Thomason barely skipped a beat. “Vandy stock is down another seven points as of ten minutes ago, two more analysts rating it a sell, and the broader market is down another thirty percent at the closing bell—”
Wells put his hand up to stop Thomason as they got into the elevator. “I need to calm down.”
“Yes, sir.”
They rode down to the ground level. The back elevators led to the executive entrance, an unmarked door that fronted Forty-Seventh Street. Wells used it half of the time he exited the building, figuring he didn’t want to be too predictable in his comings and goings. He understood that the chances of someone’s trying to kidnap or assassinate him were slim, but better safe than sorry, and anyway, the last week had not been normal times for a banking CEO.
The elevator dinged for the ground floor, and Dov got out first, as was his custom, checking the hallway for threats. He waved Wells and Thomason out, and the three of them exited the building out a safety door.
The street met Wells with a wall of noise. It was pandemonium: horns honking, people yelling, engines idling. Traffic was at a standstill on Forty-Seventh, and great waves of pedestrians seemed to be running back and forth on the sidewalks. Wells realized immediately
that getting to the press conference—they’d booked a room at an NBC studio at Rockefeller Plaza—was not going to be easy.
“We might have to walk, sir,” Thomason said, scanning the street, and Wells nodded in agreement.
Dov opened his mouth to say something—probably to object, to say how dangerous that was, Wells thought—when out of the corner of his eye Wells saw a trio of people approaching, walking right at him, one of them holding something in the air as if to present it to him. The person holding the thing in the air—a woman—was yelling at him, but Wells couldn’t hear her over the noise. Dov noticed them too and was in front of Wells in a flash, his hand reaching inside of his blue blazer, probably already on the grip of his Glock 23.
“Freeze!” Dov said in his thick Israeli accent, but the people kept coming, undeterred, which Wells thought was a bad thing, maybe even a dangerous thing, but before he could say anything, a fourth figure flashed at them from his left side, a big guy in camouflage, and he draped himself over Dov before the Israeli could react.
“Not so fast, buddy,” the guy in camo said, arms wrapped around Dov. Dov tried to buck him off, but the two of them careened onto the hood of a parked car, slamming into the steel and then bouncing to the ground like wrestlers in a staged match.
“What the fuck . . . ,” Wells barked, but the woman was ten feet away now, yelling at Wells.
“Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry, FBI!” she said, and now Wells could see that the thing she was holding up to him was a Federal Bureau of Investigation badge. “Robert Andrew Wells? We need to talk.”
Wells didn’t believe any of it. This woman did not look like an FBI agent, and if she was, why wasn’t she surrounded by other agents, instead of a goon wearing fatigues and another younger man in jeans and a T-shirt. None of it made any sense.
“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I’m calling the police—and you need to let go of my bodyguard.” As Wells moved toward Dov to try kicking at the soldier who had him pinned, a young woman stepped in his path. She was frizzy haired and chubby and had a canister of pepper spray in her hand—pointed right at Wells.
“Na, na, na, no way.” She sounded as if she’d just stepped off the D train from the Bronx. “Back it up, buddy. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Wells flinched and stepped backward, looking now for Thomason, but his executive assistant was already running down the block, moving away from the trouble as fast as his legs could carry him. Wells cursed him silently, promising to fire him the moment he got out of this jam.
“You’ve got serious trouble,” a voice snapped at him. Wells turned to see the young man in jeans strutting up to him. He radiated an almost swaggering confidence. “And if you don’t deal with it, you’re screwed.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Garrett Reilly. I work the bond desk at Jenkins and Altshuler.”
Wells blinked in surprise. What the hell was this all about? Yet, the name was familiar. Somewhere in the back of his head he knew who Garrett Reilly was.
“Someone’s about to take down Vandy,” Reilly said. “Bring the biggest too-big-to-fail bank to its knees and kill the economy.”
Wells shook his head vehemently. “That’s insane. It can’t be done.”
“Really? Have you taken a look around today?” Reilly swept his hand out across the snarled traffic and the cacophony of honking horns. “This look normal to you?”
“It has nothing to do with Vandy.”
“It has everything to do with Vandy. Don’t be an idiot.”
Wells, an angry scowl gashing his face, stepped toward Reilly. If these people were assassins, then fine, let them shoot him, but he was not going to be told about the finance business by anybody, especially not some asshole kid. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but you don’t know shit about my business, so let my goddamned bodyguard go, because I have a press conference to attend. I need to actually try to calm this city down, not listen to whack-job conspiracy theories.”
“You have a mole in your company. Somewhere inside the bank. And that mole is on the verge of leveraging you out of business.”
Wells froze. His mind raced. If there was one thing he actually did fear, it was exactly that: an employee deep inside his company, someone with access to funds and trades and derivatives, who had an ax to grind or was just plain incompetent, and who, by making terrible, horrifically stupid bets, hollowed out the finances of Vandy and leveraged the bank into the ground. Wells had called innumerable meetings on just this topic and had had endless consultants tell him how to prevent this from occurring, but still the idea haunted him: one man, secreted away on a trading desk, slowly placing bet after bet on highly speculative investments. Investments that would all come due at once and create such a tidal wave of debt that Vandy imploded before anyone could stop it from happening.
It would be a bank run to end all bank runs.
“How do you know?”
“Crowdsourcing,” the young man said.
Wells let out a snort of astonishment. Was this a joke? “You asked the idiots who troll Internet comment sections what their opinion was, and you’re peddling that to me as some kind of catastrophe warning? Are you nuts?” Before Reilly could answer, Wells suddenly remembered where he’d heard the name before. He was— “Avery Bernstein’s boy. You’re one of his homegrown quants. A pattern geek.”
Reilly made no show of acknowledging this, but there was something else about Reilly, something Wells couldn’t quite put his finger on—a rumor, maybe, or a scandal. The memory of it bounced around in his brain, just beyond his reach.
“If you don’t find that mole, you will come crashing down, and you will take everybody down with you,” Reilly said in even tones.
“We have safeguards in place. Comptrollers, supervisors, accountants. A risk-management algorithm. Every trade is vetted, every bit of leverage is taken into consideration.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You don’t know half of what goes on in your bank.”
Wells pointed a finger in Reilly’s face. “I don’t have time for this. New York doesn’t have time for this.” Wells turned to the two men still locked in each other’s arms on the pavement. “Let him go, or I swear to God I will have you all arrested.” He turned to the woman who claimed to be from the FBI. “And if you’re really from the FBI, and I seriously doubt it, then I will have you kicked off the force so fast you won’t know what hit you. You’ll be lucky to get a job screening passengers in Duluth, Minnesota.”
The woman from the FBI nodded to the marine private on the sidewalk. “Let him go.”
The man in camouflage let go of Dov, and the big Israeli jumped to his feet, yanking his pistol from his jacket. He pointed it at the man who had pinned him and yelled, “You touch me again, I fucking kill you!”
“Hey, nothing personal,” the private said with a smile. “Just a friendly tussle.”
Wells started down the sidewalk. He could see Thomason standing on the corner, cell phone to his ear, talking animatedly. Probably calling the police, Wells thought, which was exactly what he should have done. Maybe he wouldn’t fire Thomason—not yet at least.
“You think your bank is too big to fail,” Reilly called after Wells. “You’re thinking, worst-case scenario, the government steps in and bails us out. The government can just print more money.”
Wells stopped walking. He did think that. He turned to look at the assemblage of Keystone Kops who had assaulted him. They were standing in a group, young and ragged looking, not at all the people whom Wells expected to give him portents of disaster.
“But what you don’t understand is that the people who are doing this have already thought of that,” Reilly said. “They are a step ahead of you. And they’re making sure, right now, that the government won’t be paying attention when you call for help.”
Wells
felt a sharp stab of doubt in his stomach. Around him, the city heaved and growled in panic; the June air was alive with anxiety and stress, shouts of worry and the frenetic motion of uncertainty.
Reilly stared at him. “I promise you—you will never see it coming.”
MANHATTAN, JUNE 24, 5:07 P.M.
After the truck blew up, Ilya and Uni walked the rest of the span of the George Washington Bridge. The task was not hard, even with the hot wind blowing across the Hudson River, because the chaos of the explosion cleared out the upper level of the bridge, and as emergency crews and police streamed out of Manhattan to the fire, they all but ignored the pedestrians fleeing the catastrophe, which was exactly as Ilya had expected.
Yuri S. was not so lucky, and his misfortune was also by design. Ilya had decided that afternoon that the young Ukrainian would have to heroically give his life for the cause, and he did, although the heroic part was open to interpretation.
Yuri S. had jackknifed the truck into afternoon traffic, as planned, just at the halfway point of the bridge, crushing a Hyundai and pinning an SUV against a far guardrail. The eighteen-wheeler had skidded across three lanes and threatened to topple over, but didn’t, the job masterfully done. Yuri S., it had turned out, had briefly driven rigs between Kiev and Donetsk while at university. He was a man of many talents, and it was sad—a bit, at least—to lose him. When the truck came to its metal-twisting stop, Ilya embraced Yuri S.
“A job well done,” Ilya had said, and then, without warning, stabbed Yuri S. in his abdomen with a sharpened screwdriver. Ilya had to push hard on the tool to break the skin, but once that first layer was ripped, the screwdriver dove into his body easily, and Ilya twisted and churned at the Ukrainian’s soft innards. Ilya had figured that when the autopsy was done on Yuri S., a sharpened screwdriver would take the coroner a bit longer to explain than a gunshot wound. Yuri S. had shrieked in surprise, but by the time he understood what had happened to him, Ilya and Uni were out of the cab and Ilya had dialed the cell phone attached to the pipe bomb.
