Crash

by David Hagberg

  Inside, once the door was closed, Dammerman started, “They grabbed Levin without a hitch, but she didn’t have the flash drive on her.”

  Treadwell took off his suit coat and draped it over the back of the chair. “Good. That means she didn’t make a second copy.”

  “We’re not so sure,” Hardy said. “We sweated out one of the kids whose station is next to hers. He thought she might have made two copies.”

  Treadwell sat down. “Could she have given it to her friend?”

  “I think it’s a real possibility. They left the building together, but the Russian guy said he took off.”

  “Did they follow him?” Treadwell demanded.

  “They said there was no reason. Levin was their primary target.”

  “So we don’t know where he is?” Treadwell asked.

  Hardy nodded.

  “So if there was a second copy of the flash drive, he could have it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then find him. Now!”

  Ashley buzzed. “Ms. O’Connell is here.”

  “Send her in,” Treadwell said.

  As she came through the door, Hardy glared at her and left.

  “I came up as soon as I heard you were in the building,” Julia said.

  “Levin may have made two copies of the flash drive, is that right?” Treadwell demanded.

  Julia glanced at Dammerman, sitting to her left, and then back at Treadwell. “She gave me one, but Francis said that one of Hardy’s people leaned on Norm Applebaum, who apparently overheard her and Donni Imani talking. But that’s not all.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Dammerman asked.

  “The drive Cassy gave to me is garbage. But the program she described to me could attack Abacus.”

  “And stop it?” Treadwell asked, his voice suddenly soft.

  Julia nodded.

  “Fuck,” Treadwell said. “If you had the real flash drive, could you reverse engineer it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you searched the computers at her workstation?” Dammerman asked. “Maybe you can find it there.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then do it,” Treadwell said.

  Julia hesitated. “I don’t know if I want to be a part of this any longer,” she said. “I don’t know if I can take the pressure.”

  “Less than twenty-four hours, Julia,” Treadwell said. “And we need you. I need you to find Levin’s program.” He paused. “Will you help?”

  Julia nodded. She gave Dammerman one last glance and then turned and left.

  “Jesus,” Treadwell said.

  Ashley buzzed him. “Ms. Ladd is calling on one, and she sounded insistent. Do you want me to tell her to call back?”

  “I’ll take it,” Treadwell said, and he punched 1. “Now what the fuck do you want?”

  “I’m trying to find Cassy Levin. She called and said she was on her way to see me, but she never showed up. And she sounded stressed out.”

  “Who the hell is Cassy Levin?”

  “She works for you.”

  “I don’t know the name.”

  “Well, I do. I’m friends with her parents. But when I called her extension there wasn’t an answer. I want to know what the fuck’s going on, Reid.”

  “None of your business,” Treadwell said, and he slammed down the phone.

  61

  Spencer Nast glanced out the right window of the Sikorsky S-76 helicopter as they passed over the Delaware Memorial Bridge just south of Wilmington. Traffic below was heavy and once again he told himself just how glad he was that he wasn’t in that mess with all the nonentities.

  For just a brief moment his mind was off the crap CNBC was broadcasting, but then he turned his attention back to the twelve-inch TV monitor in front of him, the sound fed to his headphones.

  And nothing was good, starting with the T-bond auction that was in the middle of a gigantic meltdown. “A cataclysm,” one talking head said.

  “This is like learning that your solid brick mansion has suddenly started to crumble,” another pundit said.

  Gina Sutton, the current White House press secretary, was at the podium in the press room, holding an impromptu news conference in front of two dozen reporters. “The Treasury auction is nothing more than a temporary glitch,” she said with a straight face, and Nast had to admire her composure while telling such a major lie.

  “This is the result of China’s debt problem, and very unlikely to recur any time soon,” she said, then turned on her heel and retreated inside the West Wing.

  But she was nothing more than a shill, an imbecile, in Nast’s mind, and just about everyone in the press corps knew it.

  Of course Sam Kolberg was worse, because he didn’t have the guts to ask the president’s chief economic adviser what not to say before he allowed Gina to open her mouth.

  Nast turned back to the small screen. Markets worldwide were tumbling. The Standard & Poor’s 500—which was the prime benchmark index for the U.S. stock market—was down 10 percent. And even bond prices, in addition to Treasury notes, were in a steep nosedive.

  The timing couldn’t be better, in Nast’s estimation. Abacus, which would be set loose by the opening bell tomorrow, would kick in about the time that the China mess was likely to surface.

  As a plus point, the Treasury auction wipeout couldn’t have come at a better time. He hadn’t thought that something like that would happen this soon, and once again he had to admire Reid Treadwell’s foresight. The man was a genius.

  The pilot radioed him: “Sir, your wife has been patched through. Would you take the call?”

  Nast’s first reaction was to say Hell no. He didn’t give a damn about her, but the helicopter crew would probably think it was odd, and word would get back to the media—as such things usually did. CNBC and especially ABC hated him, for some reason, and right now he wanted to stay as far below the radar as possible.

  “Of course,” he said into his mic.

  Mildred came on. “Where are you, Spencer? What is all that noise?”

  “I’m in a helicopter on my way back to Washington. What do you want?”

  “I’m calling to remind you—again—that Billy’s back, and he’s coming over for dinner. Will you be home in time for cocktails?”

  Their son, William, had never been anything more than a lazy, indifferent fool. He was back now from an Outward Bound adventure in some ungodly place like the Rockies, and there was no doubt he would spend the entire evening complaining about the food, the bugs, the rain, and just about everything else. He was the son of the economics adviser to the president of the United States, and he never let anyone forget it.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be home,” Nast said.

  “Well, we haven’t seen him for the entire summer,” his wife whined. “At least you could make the effort.”

  Not seeing his son was a blessing. His SAT scores were subpar, and Nast had pulled a lot of strings just to get the kid into Penn State, let alone Harvard or Yale. His intelligence was on Mildred’s level, which said a lot for the idiot gene being passed along.

  “If you’d stop watching the soaps and pay attention to the real world, you’d know that we’re in the middle of a major financial crisis. And I am the chief economics adviser to President Farmer. On top of that I really don’t give a damn about choking down another of your wretched dinners.”

  “I’m sorry, Spence, but Bill is our son.”

  “For the thousandth time, my fucking name is Spencer, not Spence!”

  “I’m sorry—” Mildred began, but Nast broke the connection.

  For a long moment or two, he simply sat there, his mind seething. Life was damned unfair, and the problem was that Mildred had never realized that she was a part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  62

  Almost immediately the pilot was on. “Sir, the White House is on teleconference.”

  “Put it on.”

  Kolberg’s image
came on-screen from the president’s study, and he didn’t look happy.

  “I’m on my way, damnit. And if you have an issue with that, take it up with the fucking pilot.”

  “Listen up,” Kolberg said. “We were just on with Liu, and the man said that our crisis could lead to an actual nuclear war.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Nast demanded. “Let me listen to the recording.”

  “The president is on his way—”

  “Now, goddamnit. I know the man, I know how he thinks.”

  Kolberg nodded, and a moment later the recording came up.

  Nast listened closely to what Liu had to say, and mostly how he said it, his exact wording in English. Plus his interchange with Miller and Nichols. The most interesting part was the end, after Miller recounted how the 1929 market crash and Great Depression led to World War II, and Liu’s reply.

  But I prefer to speak with economists, who understand that the worldwide debt is out of hand. If we need to go through fire to be rid of it, then so be it.

  “He’s not talking about war,” Nast said. “You need to know the Chinese mind-set. He means economic devastation. Everything is about economics with them. That’s how they moved up from tending rice paddies to become the second largest economy in the world. If you ask them about the weather, they’ll reply in economic terms.”

  President Farmer came into view on the helicopter’s video screen and sat down at his desk. “Hell, I know that Liu may be crazier than a shithouse rat, but the boy’s not stupid. If he wants to take over the government from that empty suit Hua, there wouldn’t be anything left after a nuke exchange other than a blackened bone and a hank of hair.”

  “Are you sure, Mr. President?” Kolberg asked.

  “Yes,” Farmer said. “Now, where the hell are you, Spence?”

  “In a chopper, should be with you soon, Mr. President.”

  “Well, what about Miller and Nichols, then? Or are they AWOL?”

  “They had an appointment on the Hill,” Kolberg said. “They’ll be back when Spencer gets here.”

  “Let me guess, they’ve run off to tell their troubles to Stephanie,” Farmer said. Stephanie Holland was the Speaker of the House. “They want to end-run Spencer’s proposal.”

  Nast wasn’t surprised. “Have you had a chance to look it over, Mr. President?”

  “I did. And it looks like you want to spend a hell of a lot of my money.”

  “No, sir. The money would be coming from the Federal Reserve.”

  “I’m sure that Joe is having a shit fit over that one. Something else he can whine about to Stephanie.”

  “The auction today has shown us that investors aren’t happy with our debt load. A lot of them have even started to lose faith that we can repay the T-bonds we keep peddling.”

  Farmer rubbed his jaw. “If Liu decides not to tap some of his PBOC reserves to bail out their banks—which are in worse shape than ours are—and Hua goes for some quick cash by dumping his two trillion bucks of our Treasuries, our ability to raise more debt goes from bad to worse. Is that what you’re telling me, Spence?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nast said, pleased that Farmer had absorbed his tutorials. Sometimes it wasn’t clear that the president was understanding or even listening to what his chief economist was telling him.

  “Well, this time it’s not totally up to me. I can give Congress a nudge, but the ball’s in their court. And you’re not the man to go over and make the argument, because you don’t have friends. But Nichols is, because they like him and he’s a natural-born politician, unlike Miller, who’s a stuck-up prick.”

  “You endorse my plan, Mr. President?” Nast asked. He didn’t give a damn what anyone on the Hill felt about him, because come tomorrow it would be he who was the hero, not Nichols.

  “Well, if we end up sucking wind due to a worldwide economic meltdown, like you suggest might happen, then I think we should give it a try. Giving twenty grand to every citizen below the median income is radical, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And I’d like to wear the hero’s medal for a change.”

  “You will, Mr. President,” Nast said. He glanced over at Kolberg, who looked as if he’d just swallowed a bucket of raw jalapeños.

  “What I don’t want is a country littered with Farmervilles,” Farmer said. “But you know who could do a good job selling your proposal on the Hill? Your old boss, Reid Treadwell. Now, he’s the one who should have been a politician. Hell, he could talk a beggar out of his bowl. We all know he can talk just about any woman out of her panties. Fact is, I don’t think there’s man alive who has more need for applause than him.”

  “Reid is all of that,” Nast said.

  “In fact, I hear tell that you broke bread with him this morning while you were up in New York.”

  It sounded like an accusation to Nast, and his gut suddenly tightened. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “You heard me,” Farmer said, his voice suddenly hard. “He may be your former boss, but I’m your boss now. I want you to cut off contact with that slippery son of a bitch. It things do go south, I’ll need you in my tent, not in his. You read me?”

  “Loud and clear, Mr. President,” Nast said. “I’m your man.” But come tomorrow it wouldn’t matter what Farmer wanted.

  63

  Yuri Bykov was getting nervous about this simple assignment, especially after Leonid Anosov had phoned and said the woman didn’t have the flash drive that seemed so important to Butch Hardy. Twice he had almost phoned the Brighton Beach number to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood, but both times he’d backed off. Leonid was an old friend, and he vouched for his crew, which was good enough to take to the bank. There was no reason for him to lie.

  He stood at the dining room window looking toward the East River and the traffic on the street twenty-four stories below when Zimin came down the short hall from the bathroom and joined him.

  “Is everything in order, Yuri?” Zimin asked.

  Bykov shrugged. “I don’t like loose ends.”

  “The Brighton Beach guys?”

  Bykov shrugged again.

  “Maybe we should have handled it ourselves.”

  “Wasn’t my call.”

  “Then it’s not our problem,” Zimin said. “Do you want a beer?”

  “Later,” Bykov said. His cell phone buzzed. It was Butch Hardy.

  “I need some information about your Brighton Beach people.”

  “You hired them.”

  “They’re your pals,” Hardy said. “I want to know if the bastards are telling the truth or are they blowing smoke up my ass.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “The flash drive the woman carried out of here, goddamnit. We want it found!”

  “My people were not involved,” Bykov shot back. “You hired us to do a job, which we will do in the morning, and then we’ll be gone.”

  “You fucking well vouched for them, and we paid you a shit pot of money to do one simple job. I want it finished, do you fucking well get my point?”

  “Leonid’s not a liar.”

  “Either he is or you are. The woman left the office with a friend. Your people grabbed her and found no flash drive. It means her pal has it. But they said they didn’t see him. They’re lying.”

  “She could have dumped it somewhere,” Bykov said.

  “Not likely,” Hardy shot back. “Get me the flash drive, or we’ll want our money back. All our money.”

  Bykov wasn’t impressed. Hardy was nothing more than a little man in a job that was way out of his league. “Maybe we’ll just leave.”

  “You won’t walk away, because I could ruin your fucking reputation, and that’s the only thing that keeps people like you employed,” Hardy said. “We paid for the flash drive. Get it.” He hung up.

  64

  Anosov was at the front-door guard post talking with Dmitri Sorokin when his cell phone chimed. He answered it. “Yes.”
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  “It’s me,” Bykov said. “Can we talk?”

  “Of course,” Anosov said, and he went into the dining room, where he eased back a corner of the heavy drapes and looked out the window. Nothing moved on the street, but he was a cautious man, and Bykov sounded like he was troubled about something.

  “I got a call from the money man who wants the flash drive the woman or her partner carried out of the building where they worked.”

  “Trust me, tovarich, she doesn’t have it.”

  “I believe you, but what about the friend?”

  “She was alone when we picked her off the street.”

  “Da, but what about when you first spotted her?”

  “She was alone.”

  The phone was silent for a beat. “Think about this very hard, Leonid. These people have a lot of money and influence not only right here in New York, including Brighton Beach, but around the world. They could make a lot of trouble for us.”

  This time Anosov hesitated.

  “If the woman didn’t have the flash drive, it must mean her friend had it.”

  “She could have tossed it.”

  “Yes, but perhaps not,” Bykov pressed. “What about the friend?”

  “Yeb vas, the son of a bitch was run over by a garbage truck on Broadway before we could get to him.”

  “Any chance he survived and took off?”

  “No,” Anosov said.

  “Then his body would have been taken to the morgue. Send someone there and search his belongings.”

  “I don’t even know the bastard’s name.”

  “Find out,” Bykov said. “For all our sakes.” He hung up.

  65

  Cassy was hungry, but worse than that, she was incredibly thirsty, and she had to use the toilet. She never wanted to see anyone more than she wanted to see Ben. Yet she was frightened even of that because of the number of armed men in this place. She’d counted at least nine, and maybe more. Impossible odds even for a man like Ben.

  She rolled over on her side, her knees up to her chest, and began to cry softly.

  The door latch rattled as it was pushed back.