The 13th Enumeration

by William Struse

  Rachael lay in bed, thinking. She missed her mother so much! It would be good to talk to her now. Her thoughts changed direction as she wondered how she would go about thanking the young man she did not even know. Thank him she must, and she would figure out a way to do so.

  Chapter 9

  Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv

  Zane shuffled down the aisle with the rest of the passengers until he found his seat near the back of the plane. He stowed his backpack in the overhead carrier and sat down, trying to make himself as comfortable as he could in the cramped seat. Last night he had called several of the local hospitals to find out how the young woman had fared, but none of them would give out any information about their patients. He had opened her backpack, hoping to find some means of identification so he could return her things. All he found was a stainless-steel water bottle, a bag of nuts and twigs, an onion, and a small book. The book looked very old and was obviously worn with use. He had opened it and found it was the book of Psalms. On the front inside cover was a handwritten note which said, “To my dearest daughter: I have gained great strength from reading these words over the years. On your journey through life, I hope you find some measure of comfort in them as well. With love, your Mother.”

  The only other item of interest was a piece of cloth which was being used as a bookmark. It looked as if it had been from a piece of woman’s clothing at one time. It marked the Twenty-Third Psalm:

  YHWH is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of YHWH for ever.

  His own mother had read that to him many times as a child. What a prayer of hope and faith.

  Zane had not been sure what to do with the young woman’s things. Leaving them at the archeology dig site was not an option, and he did not have time to go to the local police station, so lacking a better alternative, he had decided to take them back to the States in hopes he could find out who she was and return them. He was sure the book of Psalms was very special to her.

  Still fidgeting for a comfortable position, Zane picked up a magazine from the pocket of the seat in front of him and started thumbing through it. It was one of those tourism magazines the airline and destination country sometimes put in airplanes to advertise places and events. As he was turning the pages, he did a double take and turned the page back. There she was . . . in an advertisement for an upcoming benefit concert for the grand opening of a new wing of the Jerusalem Antiquities Museum. She was one of the performers, along with a string ensemble from the Israel National Philharmonic Orchestra. The fine print at the bottom of the page read, “Rachael Neumann will be playing Beethoven’s ‘Sonata Pathetique.’”

  So her name was Rachael Neumann. Not only a great, although reckless, climber, but an accomplished pianist. In the picture, she was dressed in a formal white evening gown that left no doubt as to the fact that she was not only quite a woman, but also most definitely a lady. If she played the piano half as well as she climbed, that would be a performance worth seeing. At least now he could Google her and see if she was okay, as well as find a way to get her things back to her. He would take care of that as soon as he got home.

  Many hours later, Zane disembarked, picked up his luggage, and hailed a taxi. The taxi dropped him off at the college dorm where he was staying. Taking out Rachael’s backpack, he set it next to his desk, and when he had finished unpacking, he sat down and Googled her. With a few clicks, he had her address. He sat for a few moments deciding whether or not he should send a note along with her things. He didn’t want to make a big deal about what he had done, but some gesture would be nice, he thought. What should he do?

  Yes, that would do nicely. Taking out his climbing gear, he cut off five inches of his climbing rope and removed the inner core, leaving the soft, colorful casing. After melting both ends of the casing so they wouldn’t fray, he opened her book to Psalm 116 and placed his newly made bookmark there. A psalm of deliverance: “For thou has delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.”

  Both of them had reason to appreciate this psalm. His conscious mind still didn’t know how he been able to make that leap without falling. His spirit told him he’d had help. Reading the psalm one last time, he closed the book and replaced it in her backpack.

  I love YHWH, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of YHWH; O YHWH, I beseech thee, deliver my soul. Gracious is YHWH, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful. YHWH preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me. Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for YHWH hath dealt bountifully with thee. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. I will walk before YHWH in the land of the living. I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted: I said in my haste, All men are liars. What shall I render unto YHWH for all his benefits toward me? I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of YHWH. I will pay my vows unto YHWH now in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of YHWH is the death of his saints. O YHWH, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds. I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of YHWH. I will pay my vows unto YHWH now in the presence of all his people, in the courts of YHWH’S house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye YHWH. (Psalm 116:1–19 )

  Looking at the papers he had spread across his desk, he sighed with some mild frustration. He had been working on his college research paper for several months now and had reached some uncomfortable conclusions. He had not thought about it for the past week, but seeing it there now reminded him that he had a lot more work left before he could turn in his paper.

  He stared at it for a few minutes and wondered which direction he should go with it. It couldn’t hurt to give his dad a call and ask for some advice. The past couple of years, he had begun to realize how much he appreciated his father’s bits of wisdom and advice. Sufficient unto the day, he thought to himself. He would call him soon. He turned off the light, and exhausted from traveling, he lay down on his bed, clothes and all, and fell right to sleep.

  Chapter 10

  Manhattan, New York City

  As Joe opened the door to his truck to make his morning run to the gas station, he noticed a manila envelope on the seat. He quickly looked around, searching the parking garage for anything out of place. Whoever was here had bypassed the condo’s alarm system and left again without being seen. Was this the go-ahead he had been waiting for?

  His heart beating faster, Joe opened the envelope. He pulled out the cash first. Thumbing through the bills, he saw they were all hundreds. There must be at least twenty thousand dollars, he thought. Next he pulled out and fingered the key—it looked like a key to a storage rental unit. Reaching into the envelope again, he removed a single sheet of folded paper.

  The brief note read, “Proceed with the plan. Start the process on Sunday night, October 31. This key fits storage unit #131 at Manhattan Self Storage. There you will find four fifty-gallon drums which you will add to the process. Do not go to the storage unit until the night of the 31st.”

  Joe frowned, wondering what his contact wanted him to add to the fuel mixture. Not that it mattered much to him. They all deserved what they had coming to them.

  The final items in the envelope were a passport, driver’s license, credit c
ard, and round-trip ticket from Newark to Dubai. The departure time on the ticket was six Monday morning, the first of November. He sure hoped the plane departed before all hell broke loose. Six a.m. was cutting it kind of close.

  He opened the German passport and found his face staring back at him. “Looks like I’ll be traveling as Gerhard Schroeder,” he muttered to himself. He sure hoped whoever had forged these documents knew what they were doing.

  He looked at his watch. Today was the third of October. He only needed six hundred more gallons of fuel to fill up the bladder tanks. He would be finished with the fueling in two more days. No problem there, but how was he going to add the fifty-gallon drums to the mix? Not knowing what nasty surprises they had in those drums, he sure as heck did not want to handle them any more than he had to. He could dump them into the pool on the first floor. It wouldn’t take much to run a pipe from the pool cleaning system down into the garage and connect it to the tank manifold. He could even reprogram the pool’s IntelliTouch control system to turn on its pump and empty the pool into the fuel bladders’ piping after, say, six hours. Yes, that would work. Most of the diesel fuel would be pumped into the city’s main water line, the pool’s pump would kick in, and ten thousand gallons of pool water and two hundred gallons of surprise would be pumped into the city’s main water system as a chaser.

  * * *

  The Baker returned to the basement after most of his baking preparations were completed. He opened the secret room behind the closet wall and entered, closing the door behind him, then turned off the heavy-duty battery charger. Hanging over his sewer line was a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves. He put these on, and taking an eight-millimeter nutdriver from a niche in the wall, disconnected the rubber couplings which connected the sewer line from his building to the city’s main sewer line. Removing almost a meter-long section of pipe, he reached into the sewer main and felt around for his daily catch.

  At this time of the morning, the water and sewage waste running through the pipe were at a minimum. His fingers felt for the familiar small, leaden objects. This morning there were three, as was often the case. The most he had ever found was five.

  Usually there was no trace of the capsule. The water-soluble recipe only lasted two or three hours before it disintegrated. When the magnets captured the objects, they normally broke the weakened capsule, and the lead-encased flash drives fell to the bottom of the sewer pipe. The weight and flat surfaces of the lead kept it within inches of where it had fallen, regardless of the water volume that flowed over it. Quite a clever idea, if he did say so himself. Anyone in the network who had access to a toilet within half a kilometer upstream of the bakery could anonymously deliver their message. No meeting in person, no dead drops under park benches, and best of all, no electronic delivery with traceable origin and destination.

  With efficient and practiced skill, the Baker reconnected his sewer line to the city main. Removing a small plastic bag from his pocket, he placed the lead-encased memory drives into the bag. He hung the gloves back over the exposed sewer pipe and replaced the nutdriver in its niche. With a laugh, he thought to himself that he doubted his bakery customers would approve if they knew he played in the sewer in the morning while their bread was rising. With that pleasant thought, he returned upstairs, the plastic bag secure in the pocket of his pants.

  Chapter 11

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  Dylan Gallos stared at the wall of computer screens in his command center. Darius had allowed him to spend whatever he needed to ensure he had real-time access to every financial market in the world. One of the nice things about the Dubai Tower was that, since it was so new, it had the latest fiber-optic technology for screaming fast speeds. Dylan was running some cutting-edge trading software he had designed. He needed all the bandwidth he could get.

  On his main monitor, he pulled up the stock price of Aquarius Elemental Solutions (AQES.BB). When Darius’s company first went public, it was traded on the NASDAQ, which had a minimum share price and capitalization requirement to be listed on its exchange. When a NASDAQ stock fell under a dollar a share for a certain amount of time, it was delisted from the NASDAQ and traded on the Over The Counter Bulletin Board. These companies still had to file the necessary paperwork with the SEC, but on the OTCBB they had no minimum share price, market capitalization, corporate governance, or other requirements to be quoted.

  Thanks to the guiding hand of Dylan and a little help from some toxic financing hedge funds, AQES had gone from a share price of five dollars to where it now traded at $0.00012 a share. New start-up companies that did not have the backing of huge hedge funds or Wall Street banks typically went to predatory or “toxic” funding sources that would give the start-ups much-needed cash in exchange for stock shares. They would then create some hype about the stock in order to get the share price up so they could dump their shares. In the business, this was called a “pump and dump.” Once they unloaded their shares, they would then short the same stock using “naked shorts” (or fake shares) and ride it back down to a fraction of the original share price. Naked shorts were illegal, but the regulatory agencies didn’t seem to want to do anything about them. Most companies survived for several cycles of this toxic death spiral and then went bankrupt. Even companies with marketable products or ideas often did not survive long enough to get their products into the general market.

  AQES was one of the rare exceptions to this rule. After five years, AQES had gone from five dollars a share and ten million shares outstanding to $.00012 a share and one-hundred-billion shares outstanding. Darius had applied for and received permission for another shelf offering of sixty billion shares, allowing him the flexibility to issue the shares at his discretion. They had used the toxic financing firms for their own means. No one would look at AQES.BB and think twice about what had happened. As far as Wall Street was concerned, they were just another casualty of toxic financing.

  When Darius had brought Dylan on board and explained his technology and a general outline of what he wanted to do, Dylan had immediately seen the potential to exploit the circumstances into an unimaginable fortune. Together they set in motion a plan that, if it succeeded, would overturn the very order of the financial world. Somehow they had been able to keep their secret, and now it was only two more weeks until they really began to shake things up.

  As part of their compensation, each member of the team had been given one billion shares of AQES.BB. Dylan’s models predicted that once the technology was vetted and accepted as genuine, the share price would trade in excess of a thousand dollars a share. Aquarius Elemental Solutions would be the largest company, by market share, in the world. The six members of the team would be some of the richest people on the planet.

  He almost chuckled, then tried to bring himself back in check. A lot could happen before that came to pass, so he had to remain cautious.

  Dylan once more checked the filings with the SEC and other regulatory agencies. Everything must be in order. They were going to be making a lot of enemies shortly, and their enemies would not need any excuses to come after AQES. Currently Darius personally owned sixty billion shares of AQES.BB in his name. In an offshore hedge fund set up for Darius, they had been soaking up the excess AQES.BB shares for the past several years. This hedge fund now owned another thirty-five billion shares of AQES.BB stock, or roughly $5.8 million worth. The actual number of shares the public could purchase was about five billion, or $650,000 worth at today’s prices. In order to make it appear that there were more shares in the public float than there were, Dylan had written a black-box program that churned the share float by a method called quote stuffing.

  On average, over two billion shares of AQES.BB traded every day. Ninety-five percent of that was Dylan’s black box. Once the public came on board, the thirty-five billion shares in the offshore account would be used to control the stock price so that other Wall Street hedge funds could not manipulate it.

  There was no doubt this would be
the most heavily traded stock in the history of the world. In the name of their hedge fund, Dylan had purchased an office in the US which allowed them direct access as a market maker to the data transmission feeds for the main exchanges. It would have added several milliseconds to their speed if they could have purchased an office in New York, but all the bandwidth there was already taken at any price. So they settled for Chicago. Dylan considered this the only real weakness of their plan. With a several millisecond advantage over them, some of the big-name hedge funds and Wall Street firms could potentially harm their stock price using algos of their own.

  When Dylan mentioned this to Darius, he replied that he did not think it would be a problem. At the time his response had seemed somewhat out of character, as their team had spent the last five years perfecting every detail of the plan. But maybe, since there was nothing they could do about it short of knocking New York into the ocean, Darius had decided not to worry about it. In any case, they would know in just a couple of weeks. Dylan could feel the pressure building.

  Chapter 12

  Darius picked up the interoffice phone and spoke. “Alexandra, do you have a few minutes? I would like to discuss the upcoming museum opening.”

  A minute later Alexandra entered his office and sat down on the other side of his desk. She had her electronic notepad and looked up when she was ready. Darius slowly turned a pencil in his fingers. “Have all the artifacts from my collection been moved to the museum?”

  “Except for the Persian tablet,” she said as she pointed to the display case which held a prominent position on the far side of the room. “That we will bring with us as you requested.”