“Goddamn it,” he muttered, glancing at his bedside clock. Four fifteen in the morning. Still black outside. Swinging his feet off the bed, he clicked on his lamp and read the message again.
Gary called back the number on the text, and someone answered on the first ring. Federal Reserve Chairman Reinhold held his tongue while he listened, grimacing. “If it’s so goddamn urgent,” he hissed at the first pause, “why didn’t you call me?”
Hushed explanations on the other end.
Didn’t want to wake him, wondered if he was up, his Deputy Chair explained.
“It’s four in the morning, did you really expect me to be up?” Chairman Reinhold wiped the sleep from his eyes. He put on his slippers and shuffled out of the bedroom, clicking on the hallway light. “What? They’re there now?” He straightened up. “Yes, yes, okay, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
His skin prickled as he hung up the phone and put it in his shirt pocket. “Jesus Christ.” Reinhold started down the stairs littered with his grandchildren’s toys. His phone rang again. “I told Juanita to pick up these goddamn—”
His left foot landed squarely in a yellow Tonka truck just as he put his weight on it. The foot shot forward, sending Reinhold spinning into space. With a dull thud, his head cracked into the edge of a bare wooden stair, his body crumpling mid-pirouette. Chairman Reinhold flopped down the last few steps to land inert at the bottom, blood seeping from a deep wound in the side of his head.
Crickets chirped in the silence.
▲▼▲
It was still dark out.
It had to be a quarter after five in the morning, but Chase Rockwell was still drunk and high. At least the cocaine kept him alert. It had been the worst night of his life. “Where the hell is he?”
Deputy Federal Reserve Chairman Sandra Rodriguez stared at Chase. She knew he was on something, but she didn’t care. “I don’t know. I talked to Chairman Reinhold over an hour ago. He said he would be here in twenty minutes.” She rocked back in her chair. “He’s not answering his phone anymore.”
“Why don’t we get started?” suggested Matt Silver, head of TransBank, sixth largest on the global banking charts. “We need to get on this right away.”
Chase sniffed and looked around the wood-paneled main conference room of the Federal Reserve of New York. “I’m not starting without Reinhold.” Rodriguez was a political appointee, three weeks into her new position. She had about as much gravitas as a chicken fajita.
No power.
And no money.
And that was what Chase needed right now.
“I disagree,” Matt Silver shot back. He shook his head at Chase. “The longer we wait, the more danger we’re putting ourselves in.”
“Why don’t I start?” Rodriguez suggested. “I can guess why you’re here, gentleman.”
Chase hadn’t expected to be surprised by Rodriguez. “You can?”
Rodriguez fixed Chase with an annoyed stare. “The positions of your banks at the end of the Tuesday flash crash are being investigated by the SEC for insider trading. Or worse. The odds of you coming out of that unscathed were—”
“Unscathed?” Chase laughed.
“You’re here to explain, I assume?” Rodriguez continued, ignoring Chase’s interruption. “Reinhold and I had a long talk with the head of the Chairman of the IMF and New York Attorney General yesterday. If your bank had anything to do with the flash crash, I can assure you that no amount of explaining is going to do either of you any good. I know you’ve gotten away with this sort of thing in the past, Mr. Rockwell, but I am not a part of the old system.”
Chase glared at Rodriguez and shook his head. Unbelievable. A part of him was going to enjoy bursting her little bubble, despite his empire burning around him.
“Our bank lost $24 billion yesterday,” Matt Silver interjected. “That’s why we’re here.”
Rodriguez turned to face Silver, her head swiveling so fast it seemed as if it wasn’t connected to her body. “Excuse me?”
“Twenty…four…billion,” Matt Silver repeated. “And I suspect Chase here has a similar story.”
“Eighteen billion,” Chase whispered, still not wanting to say it aloud. “Only eighteen. Glad you beat me on this one, Matt.”
Matt Silver didn’t smile at Chase’s attempt at humor. “I don’t need to remind you that in the 2008 crash Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy was triggered by a $2 billion loss, and AIG’s by only $11 billion,” he said to Rodriguez.
“Twenty-four billion?” Rodriguez looked like she was in shock.
“Forty two if you add us together,” continued Silver. “And I bet we’re not the only ones. We can’t open our trading systems today. We had to shut everything down.”
“How did this happen?” asked Rodriguez.
“Automated trading agents,” Chase replied. “At least for us. For two days they worked like magic, protecting our assets, so we shifted everything into their control, and then boom!” He mimicked an explosion between his two hands. “Yesterday, everything went sideways.”
“Can we fix it?” Rodriguez mumbled. “Can I send over someone to look at it?”
“You aren’t listening to me.” Matt Silver got up out of his chair and pointed at the skyscrapers of Manhattan outside. A gray light was gaining on the horizon. “When the day starts, our trading systems will be down. Sure, for a few hours we might be able to stall, but when other banks realize that they’re not getting their money from us—”
“We had to shut down yesterday afternoon,” Chase said. “The markets are already smelling blood.”
Matt Silver put both hands on the conference table and faced Rodriguez. “Total global financial collapse, that’s what’s going to happen this morning.”
The phone on the conference room table rang. It had to be Chairman Reinhold. Rodriguez punched the phone’s answer button, putting it on conference call. “Gary, where are you, we need you in—”
“This isn’t Gary, this is Max Pfeiffer. Who the hell is this?”
“Sandra Rodriguez, Mr. Pfeiffer.”
Even over the conference link, Rodriguez sat up straighter, like a scolded schoolgirl. Chase snickered. At least this young grasshopper knew who the Chairman and CEO of the world’s largest manufacturing conglomerate was.
“What in the world are you people doing over there?” Pfeiffer growled over the phone. “Have you seen the commercial paper markets in Shanghai and London this morning?”
“No, I haven’t had the time—”
“You better bloody well make the time. Where the hell is Gary Reinhold? I’ve been trying his phone for the past hour.”
Chase had never heard of Pfeiffer losing his temper before. The German industrialist was famous for keeping an even keel, no matter what the situation.
“We can’t get in touch with him, either, Mr. Pfeiffer,” Rodriguez replied.
“Well you tell him, when you see him, that the global commercial paper market has evaporated. Even I can’t borrow a cent. Even the f’ing mafia has closed up shop today. Do you understand? No commercial paper borrowing means no payroll for my two hundred thousand workers who build everything from airplanes to nuclear reactors. Whatever you assholes have done over there, the financial market isn’t the only thing affected.” He paused. Heavy breathing filled the silence. “You don’t fix this, you turn off the lights. Everywhere in the world.”
The line went dead.
Then the phone rang again.
This time Rodriguez didn’t pick it up. “Tanya, who is that?” she called out.
“The managing editor of the Financial Times, says it’s urgent,” came a muffled reply from the hallway.
And then more ringing. It sounded like a dozen phones chirping and buzzing in symphony. Rodriguez glanced from Silver to Rockwell, then back again.
Chase couldn’t believe it, but he was enjoying this. The shock he felt at losing billions of dollars was wearing off like a day-old hangover. Of course he had a few milli
on tucked away in cash, buried in vaults on Caribbean Islands. Whatever happened, one way or the other, he’d be working on his tan the following afternoon.
The phone on the conference room table stopped ringing.
“Sorry, Ms. Rodriguez, never mind about the Financial Times editor,” came Tanya’s voice from the hallway.
Rodriguez looked palpably relived, letting out a small sigh.
“Because I have the China Banking Regulatory Commissioner on the line. He wants to talk to Chairman Reinhold—or whoever is in charge.”
Rodriguez’s hands gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white. “Tell him we’ll call him back.”
Chase decided it was time to ask. “We need capital, Ms. Rodriguez, enough for us to open our trading systems this morning. Otherwise”—he shrugged—“global Armageddon.”
“How much?” whispered Rodriguez.
“A blank check,” Chase replied.
“No.” Matt Silver glanced at Chase. “A trillion dollars, we could cap it at a trillion.”
Rodriguez didn’t reply, but all the color drained from her face. “You realize that’s tax payer money you’re talking about.”
Chase shrugged. “I pay taxes.”
“Really? I bet you pay less than the girl who served you drinks all night.” Rodriguez gazed at Chase in stony silence.
“You know who I’m surprised isn’t here with us?” Matt Silver asked, breaking the staring contest. “Henry Montrose, the Bluebridge chairman. He must have lost as much as us, but that old dog, who knows what tricks he has up his sleeve? If there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about automated agent systems, it’s Montrose and Bluebridge.”
“If we could sort out the technical issues, you think that might help?” Rodriguez asked.
“It would be a start,” Chase replied. There wasn’t any graceful degradation to the previous system of doing it by hand.
“Tanya!” yelled Rodriguez. “Get me Henry Montrose on the phone. Now! And I don’t care who you have to kill to find him!” She took a deep breath. “And get some more coffee in here.”
▲▼▲
Cormac Ryker stared at the single, solitary light on the tenth floor of building three of the Two Bridges apartment complex. It was five forty-five in the morning. The skies had finally cleared. From his viewpoint on top of the Manhattan Intergate building, he had a view of the beautiful sunrise over Long Island to the east. He also had a beautiful view of Jake O’Connell, sitting in front of a computer monitor in that tenth floor apartment.
“You can run, little worm,” Cormac whispered, “but you can’t hide.”
Cormac had his own team this time. No more finesse, no more fooling around. Blunt trauma, instead of surgical.
It was time to bring this to an end.
46
Kahnawake Indian Reserve
Quebec
Dean groaned. Black soot covered him in a greasy film from head to foot. With a grunt, he leaned over and grabbed the red handle of a generator and yanked it.
It roared to life, joining the growl of more than thirty other portable generators they’d found around Kahnawake overnight. They were spaced across the grass out in back of the MIT building, in front of the still-smoking wreckage of the three back-up generator plants. He had a whole crew working to scrounge whatever they could find to generate electricity, pulling generators from houses and smaller buildings, out of garages and basements.
He sat on top of the generator and held his head in his hands. They’d lost Daniels the night before. Gunshot to the chest. He’d drowned in his own blood before they could get him out past the barricades. There were no major hospitals inside Kahnawake.
The loss was heavy.
A mercenary had been killed as well.
It was a miracle there hadn’t been more deaths in the confusion. Firefights had erupted, skirmishes unfolding across the reservation. They’d captured six of the mercenaries, but Dean had a feeling it was only a small part of the attacking force. They’d interrogated them, held them in the Peace Keeper prison lock-up not far from MIT, but they weren’t saying anything. They were sticking to the line that they were upset citizens who’d banded together to put an end to the Mohawk blockade of the roads.
Problem was, media and public opinion was grim enough to half-believe it.
The battery backups had done their job and kept the servers in MIT running after the bombing of the generators. A team of electricians had managed to jury-rig an electrical system to connect the growing farm of gas-powered generators out back to recharge the UPS. So far they had three hundred thousand watts coming in, enough to power over a thousand servers at full capacity. Dean had to shut down half of MOHAWK in Server Rooms D and E to conserve energy, and they were still draining the UPS—but they could keep it up for another day.
The problem now was cooling the servers. The air conditioning systems used up half as much power as the servers themselves did, so they’d opened all the doors and windows they could, put fans in to circulate the air. It helped, but some servers had already shut down due to over-heating.
Dean had run over after the explosion, expecting to see a crater in the ground where the MIT building had been, but MIT itself wasn’t damaged. The attackers hadn’t been able to get close enough given the defensive squads Dean had put in place to protect it. They got close enough, however, to detonate the fuel tanks next to the generators, as well as the fuel depots of the two gas stations within Kahnawake’s perimeter.
“You got a call inside,” someone yelled from the second floor entrance above Dean’s head.
Dean glanced up, raising one hand before his eyes to block the sun. It was past ten o’clock in the morning. “Jake?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Harry, one of his technicians.
In the small hours of the morning, Dean had decided to tell his technicians what was really happening, expecting them to tell him he was crazy. Instead, they’d asked questions, nodded, and then quietly got back to work.
Dean’s heart had nearly burst with pride. They were brave Mohawks, fighting an unimaginable enemy without question. Every one of them had stayed, even after the destruction of the evening before, even after one of their own had been killed.
“Be up in a sec.” Dean stopped to inspect the farm of generators, humming away in the dew-wet grass, extensions snaking around them like umbilical cords. Satisfied, he pulled off his gloves, tucked them into the pockets of his coveralls, and jogged up the outside stairs.
Harry waited, holding the door open. “This way, sir.”
Dean was teaching Harry, and some other Mohawk students, IT basics in the abandoned schoolhouse beside the gas station next door. Harry was twenty-one. He was one of the kids Sean and Jake had pulled from the bus accident seventeen years ago. It was probably part of the reason his technicians had accepted the story he’d told them the night before—because they knew who Jake was, and what he meant to the tribe.
Dean stopped and smiled at the kid. “This isn’t the military, Harry.”
Straight-faced, Harry replied, “I know.” He let a tiny smile creep across his face. “Sir.”
Dean managed a smile back—glad there was still some good spirit—and patted Harry on the shoulder, then walked past him down the corridor to the Link Room. The mood outside was ugly. Frightening. The Mohawk Warriors manning the barricades now realized they had a real fight on their hands. They were out for blood, feeling trapped and cornered, the memories of long ago battles their tribe had lost filtering into their souls. Dean wasn’t sure if he could even stop the situation from escalating now.
It was going to get out of control, if it wasn’t already.
Keying and fingerprinting his way into the Link Room, he found Jake staring at him, grim-faced, from a computer screen.
“4—8—7,” said Jake.
Dean stopped and pulled the one-time pad labeled Jake from his pocket. “How are you, Jake?” he asked after he verified the code.
“I�
��m sorry about Daniels, he seemed like a good man.”
Dean nodded. “He was a close friend.” They’d already talked during the night. Dean had called to tell Jake as soon as the fighting had stopped.
Elle was still out searching for Anna, but the police and FBI hunted for her and Eamon as well. If the authorities arrested Jake and Elle, even if they could find Anna, she’d go into child protective custody—into foster care. Jake hadn’t said much about it, but Dean imagined the pain he must be feeling.
“The situation’s stable, at least for now.” Dean sat heavily. “We still need to be careful, even with these one-time pads. If Bluebridge is listening in, it’s possible it could insert itself with a man-in-the-middle attack and seamlessly continue the video after we do our code check. Difficult to do, but it might be possible.”
“I figured as much,” Jake said. “You know, the two times when the machine called me, I remember having a weird feeling both times. I’m going to listen to my gut from now on.”
He was probably right. Human intuition was hard to beat if you really listened to it. “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep MOHAWK running,” Dean admitted.
If there could be a positive aspect to the tragedy of Daniels’s death, it was that public opinion had shifted overnight when news of the explosions and attacks in Kahnawake hit the social media streams. Now there was a growing call for the government to pull the military away.
Jake took a deep breath. “You don’t need to anymore. Call it off. I think you’ve done enough.”
“I’m not sure I can do that now. This fight has gained a momentum of its own,” Dean said. “And anyway, this isn’t your call. You’re Mohawk too, Jake. We’re family. Those kids out there are fighting for our family. We’re going to get Anna back, Jake. We’re going to beat this thing. We didn’t do all this to lose our nerve in the last moment. We’ve gotta let all barrels loose, all the way to the end.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to make it out of this.” Jake’s jaw clenched. “If you don’t hear from me in two hours, send the media announcements out. Crashing the global economy is going to raise a lot of questions. Bluebridge will be exposed one way or the other.”
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