Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Is she ever going to wake up?” he said, his face full of angst as he turned to them.

  “The doctor’s not sure,” Jack said quickly, before Eddie could speak. “It’s touch and go. She might enter a persistent vegetative state.”

  This earned a questioning look from Eddie that Jack ignored. He’d pulled the term out of his store of unwanted coma lore.

  “Like that lady in Florida?” Harris said.

  Jack nodded. “Exactly. Terry Schiavo all over again.” He hoped Eddie would stay clammed.

  Harris turned back to the bed and stepped closer to Weezy. He shook her shoulder as he leaned over her. He spoke in a low voice but Jack caught the words.

  “Wake up, Louise. You’ve got to wake up. I think I’ve found him. I think I know who he is.”

  “Found who?” Jack said.

  Harris jumped and turned. “Nothing. A private matter.” He suddenly looked scared. “I don’t care what the report says, I’ll bet this wasn’t an accident. They found her and got to her. They’ve finally silenced her.”

  “We can’t let that happen,” Jack said, flicking a glance at Eddie. “She mustn’t be silenced. I think she knew they were closing in, and that’s why she came to her brother here. To continue her quest for the truth.”

  Eddie cleared his throat. “Yes. I, um, run a small security firm—”

  Harris stiffened. “Securities?”

  Jack wondered why that word would cause a reaction.

  “No,” Eddy said. “Security—as in building security. You know, hospitals and such.” He nodded toward Jack. “This is one of my employees.”

  Swell. Now I’m working for Eddie.

  Jack said, “Yeah. She told us she thought she might need some protection.”

  Harris snorted and looked back at the bed. “Some protection.”

  “She was just bringing us up to speed,” Jack said. “She was worried about endangering her brother, so she was very stingy with her information.”

  Harris nodded, a little more enthusiastic now. “Oh, yeah. That was Louise, all right.”

  “You said it.” Jack looked at Eddie. “Like pulling teeth, right, boss?”

  Eddie turned away. It looked like he might be fighting tears but Jack was sure he was fighting off a smile from the “boss” line. When he turned back he was composed.

  “Sorry. This is very hard.”

  Jack said, “Let me be blunt here: I’m thinking that she thought someone wanted her dead. Am I right?”

  Harris nodded. “Permanently silenced, yeah.”

  Jack pressed his case. “Well, it’s not permanent, not as long as she’s breathing and has a chance to come out of this coma. So that means someone might try again. We can’t protect her very well if we don’t know who we’re protecting her from. That’s where you come in.”

  “Me?”

  Jack was already winging it, so he decided to push it a little further.

  “She told us about someone special, someone close to her that she trusted, but she wouldn’t give us a name.” Jack narrowed his eyelids and fixed a B-movie stare on Harris. “I’ve got a feeling that trusted guy is you.”

  He nodded. “Well, I was—I mean, I am.”

  “Then you need to fill in the blank spaces she left us—for her sake.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  Eddie said, “I told you: I can’t protect my sister if—”

  “—if you don’t know who to protect her from. Right-right-right. But you need to know that she didn’t tell me much. Only just enough to help her find what she was looking for.”

  “We’ll take whatever you can give,” Jack said.

  He chewed his lip. “Okay. Is there someplace private we can talk? You know, where we can’t be overheard?”

  Jack thought about that. Julio’s was out—didn’t want anyone tailing him there. Then he remembered that they were right across the street from Central Park.

  “How about down by the reservoir? We can find an isolated spot in the open where no one’s in earshot and—”

  Harris made a face. “Ever hear of a parabolic microphone? Someone could be listening in from a hundred yards away. We’d be better off in a bar or a restaurant.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s way before the dinner crowd. We should have no problem finding an isolated table in a midscale place.”

  Jack couldn’t argue with that. He’d always linked paranoia to longevity, though Harris was taking it a bit far.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  But no way Harris was picking the restaurant.

  19

  “I guess this is good enough,” Harris said.

  As the hostess led him and Eddie toward the pub’s empty rear dining area, Jack hung back near the door, waiting to see who would follow them in.

  Harris had chosen a Mexican place on Lex but Jack had vetoed that and picked this Irish pub on Third Avenue at random. He’d kept his eye out for a tail on the way over. Hadn’t made one, but the streets were crowded with summer tourists—a bird-dogger’s dream.

  A couple of laughing young girls speaking something that sounded like Swedish popped in five minutes later. He waited another five and when no one followed, he joined the other two at the booth in a rear corner. He had Eddie slide over so he could take the outside seat facing the bar area.

  A florid-faced waiter with a big belly stretching his vest to the limits of its tensile strength asked in a brogue if they wanted a drink before dinner. Eddie ordered another martini, Harris a Guinness.

  Jack shook his head. “Not while I’m on duty. Right, boss?”

  Eddie rubbed his mouth. “We’ll make an exception this time.”

  Jack said, “Well, I don’t much like beer but maybe I’ll try something I saw on tap as I passed the bar. I believe it’s called Smithwick’s?” He deliberately pronounced the “w.”

  Eddie appeared to be trying very hard not to roll his eyes.

  Jack turned to Harris as the waiter left. “Okay. What can you tell us? You told Weezy you ‘found him.’ Who did you find?”

  Harris hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. She’s had me looking into a particular stock account.”

  Jack said, “You mean a brokerage account?”

  “Right. In this case, a UBS account. Opened in Basel, Switzerland, in July of 2001 by a Spaniard named Emilio Cardoza.”

  Eddie looked as puzzled as Jack felt. “So?”

  “It became active the week of September third—the week before the planes hit the towers.”

  That brought a hush to the table. Jack broke it, saying, “How active, and what was he buying?”

  “More like what he was selling.” He paused for some sort of effect but it was lost on Jack.

  “Are you going to tell us or what?”

  Harris sighed. “On September sixth he purchased puts on American Airlines, United Airlines, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Lots of them.”

  Jack saw Eddie’s expression register shock but hadn’t a clue as to why.

  “What’s a put?”

  They both stared at him. Jack didn’t even attempt to explain why he knew so little about the stock market. A person needed a Social Security number to open a brokerage account, and would be expected to pay taxes on the profits. Jack didn’t have an SSN and had yet to file a 1040. So, when reading the paper, he tended to skip to another article at first sight of words and acronyms like Dow Jones and NASDAQ.

  Eddie said, “A put is an option, essentially a contract that will allow the holder to sell stocks at a specified price by a given date. A call is the opposite, allowing you to buy a certain stock at a specified price by a given date.”

  Jack’s turn to stare. “Okay. Could you try that in English? I never learned Wookie.”

  Harris said, “Look: If you buy a put on United Airlines stock and the price suddenly drops, you pocket the difference between the higher price of the put and lower price of the stock. Puts are sold in blocks of a hundred. Puts for a thousand shares for a stock selli
ng at a hundred bucks a share will net you twenty-five grand if the share price drops to seventy-five.”

  Another moment of dead silence as that sank in. Jack didn’t like the feeling seeping through him. The jets hijacked on 9/11 had belonged to American and United Airlines. That meant . . .

  “So this Cardoza was betting that the stocks of those two airlines would drop?”

  “You got it. Plus Morgan Stanley Dean Witter as well.”

  “Why them?”

  “They occupied twenty-two floors of the North Tower.”

  “Holy shit . . .” Jack leaned back. “He knew.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  The waiter arrived with their drinks and asked if they were ready to order their meals. Nobody wanted anything, and that didn’t go over too well.

  “If you’ll be sitting in the dining area,” he said with a stern look, “you’ll be ordering food.”

  Well, they needed the privacy—especially with the bombshells Harris was dropping.

  But were they private? The choice of the pub had been as random as Jack could imagine. No one was in earshot. He’d been keeping an eye on the bar area. No one there had shown any interest in them, but bars held countless reflective surfaces. Someone could be scoping them out in a mirrored beer sign. Jack had done it plenty of times himself. But even if they were, they couldn’t hear—that was the important thing.

  To satisfy the food requirement, they each ordered an appetizer. Jack chose the fried calamari. This being an Irish pub, he figured he’d be dealing with the equivalent of breaded rubber bands, but nobody said he had to eat it. The waiter departed reasonably happy.

  When they were alone again, Harris pulled the manila folder from his backpack and shuffled through the papers.

  “My guy wasn’t alone.” He peered at a sheet. “Here. In the week before the Towers attack there was no bad news about air travel in general and no bad news about either American or United in particular. Both were trading in the low thirties. Yet on September sixth and seventh, the CBO—”

  “The what?”

  “The Chicago Board Options Exchange—it handles zillions of puts and calls. It recorded over forty-seven hundred puts on United and less than four hundred calls those days. The volume on the sixth, the Thursday before the attack, was two hundred and eighty-five times the average—an incomprehensible increase.”

  “All in one account?”

  “No. In numerous accounts. The people who knew what was coming were moving to cash in.”

  Jack shook his head. “You’ve got to be making this up.”

  “I’m not. Same thing happened to American Airlines on the tenth, the day before the attack—over forty-five hundred puts. Way, way, way above average. Same with Morgan Stanley: twenty-five times the usual daily average in puts. The stock markets were closed the rest of the week after the attack, but when they reopened on the seventeenth, United dropped forty-three percent and American dropped forty. Morgan Stanley dropped too. The result: Anyone who held puts on those stocks cleaned up.”

  “But everything dropped,” Eddie said. “The whole market tanked. Someone could have simply shorted the indexes and cleaned up.”

  “Not to the extent our boy did. Relatively, the Dow dropped a mere fraction of what United, American, and Morgan Stanley suffered.”

  The conversation was making Jack gladder than ever that he kept his money in gold.

  Harris said, “At that time, a one-hundred-share put on United was selling for around ninety bucks. He bought a hundred of them for nine grand.”

  “Meaning he had options on ten thousand shares,” Eddie said. “How much did United drop?”

  “Thirteen bucks.”

  Eddie whistled. “He made a hundred and thirty thousand on that one deal alone.”

  Harris nodded. “Fifteen hundred percent profit. But that’s not all. Our boy also purchased calls—meaning he expected the stock price to rise—on Raytheon.”

  Jack looked at them. “Which is . . . ?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Eddie said. “A defense contractor. They make Tomahawk missiles.” He sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “I can guess what happened to Raytheon when the market reopened.”

  Harris was nodding. “Big jump—thirty-seven percent.”

  Jack was finding all this . . . incredible. Literally.

  “Is this for real? I mean—don’t take offense—but we have only your word that any of this went on, and we don’t know you.”

  Harris shrugged. “I know it’s a lot to swallow, but it’s all verifiable. Look it up yourself. The put-call ratios are a matter of public record.”

  Well, if so, that raised an obvious question . . .

  “Hold on a sec. If this kind of bump in activity was recorded, how come no one else noticed?”

  “Believe me, plenty of people have noticed. The SEC even launched an investigation—or at least said it did.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Have you heard of any arrests?”

  “No, but then I don’t pay much attention to—”

  “I do,” Harris said. “I pay a lot of attention. And not a single person has been arrested.”

  “But how do they explain—?”

  Harris shrugged. “They don’t. It’s been dropped.”

  “Sounds like How to Spark a Conspiracy Theory one-oh-one.”

  “For sure. And the conspiracy theory is bolstered by the fact that two and a half million dollars’ worth of puts remain uncollected.”

  Eddie leaned forward. “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t think they expected the markets to close so quickly. They probably planned to make a quick transaction the next day, before anyone made the connection between the whacked-out put-call ratios and the attacks, and disappear. But the markets stayed closed all week and after that they didn’t dare collect.”

  “What about your boy?” Jack said.

  “With his foreign account, he managed to execute the options and get away with it.”

  “I gather then from what you said to Weezy that you’ve been looking for this Cardoza and you’ve found him.”

  “Well, yes, and no. There is no Emilio Cardoza—at least, the Emilio Cardoza who opened the account doesn’t exist.”

  “Then you haven’t found him.”

  Harris smiled. “Oh, but I have. Louise assumed it was a false identity and asked me to look into it. She bought me tickets to Basel and Madrid and paid all my expenses. With the help of a bunch of euros—also supplied by Louise—I managed to get my hands on a security photo of Cardoza.”

  Jack spread his hands. “So he does exist.”

  “Only on paper. I speak decent Spanish and in Spain I showed his photo around and learned that his real name is Bashar Sheikh, a Pakistani whose last known residence was just outside Tarragona, Spain.”

  Jack’s bullshitometer was redlining. Pass a few euros in Switzerland and get a photo . . . show that photo around in Spain and get a real name. All Jack knew about international intrigue was what he’d read in novels, but whatever the reality was, it couldn’t be that easy. And Harris was no George Smiley.

  Eddie looked equally baffled. “If this is supposed to mean something, it doesn’t.”

  Harris said, “I don’t know what it means either. Sheikh hasn’t been seen or heard from since the spring of ’04. I’ve never heard of the man, but he immediately looked familiar. I’ve seen his face before, but I can’t place him. But I knew Louise would recognize him because—”

  “—she never forgets anything,” Jack and Eddie said in unison.

  Harris stared at them, nodding. “Right. I guess you two really do know her.”

  “As only a brother who grew up in her academic shadow could.”

  Jack remembered how Weezy always did well in school and could have been number one in her class, year in and year out, if she’d chosen to be. Not only did she have that photographic memory, but she could put all her stored data to use—often in ways
that were a little too unique for her teachers. Eddie had had a hard time following in her footsteps. Academically, he’d been the Andrew Ridgeley of the Connell kids.

  “So anyway, when I got back yesterday I started calling her as soon as I landed.”

  “Why didn’t you call her from Spain?” Jack said.

  Harris gave him a look. “Do you have any idea how closely overseas calls are monitored?”

  Jack didn’t. He didn’t travel.

  “Okay. You waited till you got back. You called and got no answer, and became worried.”

  “Right. I mean, I wasn’t worried at first. Sometimes she goes off the grid—turns off her phone and doesn’t check her e-mail—but never for more than a day. I thought yesterday was one of those days, so while I was waiting I went through my photo files, looking for that face. But it wasn’t there. Today I began calling again and still no answer. Now I was worried. So I came over.” He shrugged. “And the rest you know.”

  “No, pal,” Jack said. “Not even close. You said there were multiple accounts buying those puts. Why did she choose this particular one?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “Well, since I can’t do that, I’m asking you.”

  “Well, then you’re out of luck, because she didn’t tell me. She tells me only what she thinks I need to know, and I guess she didn’t think I needed to know that. But I have an idea.”

  “We’re waiting.”

  “Emilio Cardoza was listed as from Tarragona. In July of 2001, Mohammed Atta, the leader of the nine/eleven attacks, visited Spain and dropped out of sight in the Tarragona area. It’s widely believed he met with high-ups from al Qaeda to finalize the plan of attack. I will bet—although I have no facts to base it on—that they used Bashar Sheikh’s home as a safe house.”

  Eddie tapped the table. “You said he opened his account in July.”

  “Yep. Right after Atta returned to the U.S. Atta landed in Miami on the nineteenth, and the Cardoza account was opened on the twenty-third. Seems pretty obvious that Sheikh knew the details and decided to cash in.”

  Jack tried to put himself in that position and couldn’t imagine doing something so damn stupid.

  “Idiot.”