Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  Howard made a ton of money, and he spent a ton plus one. If the first part of that equation experienced more than a hiccup, he was in trouble with the second, because the latter would not abate quickly if ever. There were a few other debts as well—negative account values that he may have conveniently forgotten to tell Marjorie about. He and a couple partners from the club had invested in a hotel in Taos that specialized in basalt rubs and steam rooms. The problem was that the establishment was never more than twenty percent full, no matter how much money they poured into it. It was in the midst of a second renovation, and Howard sensed that the money was literally taking a mud bath. Finally, he had doodled around with some futures trading strategies in his personal account. Those moves were in the red by a couple million, and his broker-dealer was giving him as much time as he needed because he ran Montgomery. But the time-out wouldn’t last forever.

  Howard still had some tricks up his sleeves. He had made plans to deal with his debts and he was carrying them out, but one deadly characteristic of money was the way issues snowballed. Such was the nature of the cascade. Inertia was a hell of a force. Objects in motion stay in motion, and those that are falling? Gravity is relentless.

  Beyond everything, Howard was guilty of neglecting the fact that Montgomery’s liabilities might become his own. He was reaching the conclusion that he had to stick his finger in the dike immediately. He needed to stay on top of all this, slowly start making the bank’s money back, cement the board of directors’ full confidence in him, and continue doing exactly what he’d done for over thirty years in the fiduciary business: Win at all costs. He knew he could do it, but he also knew that the next few weeks would constitute a precarious tightrope walk over the raging rapids.

  Howard stirred when his cell phone started to vibrate on the marble surface of his tub. His bad night was about to turn into a nightmare. He picked up.

  “This is Howard,” he said. He listened. At first he was incredulous but calm as Roger O’Neill briefed him about the robbery of their armored truck on the FDR just a few minutes before. Then Howard slowly became enraged. Luckily he had insurance for this circumstance, but the one-two punch of bad trade management and a physical loss was not something he was expecting in the lovely twilight of his career. He contracted all of the muscles in his body as he screamed from the depths of his belly, “No, that will not suffice!”

  Howard lifted himself out of the tub and stomped out of the bathroom, dripping wet and screaming for his wife. “Marjorie, call Steve. I need a car back to the city. Immediately!”

  ■

  Roger O’Neill stood at the scene of the crime listening to Howard berate him. Far from resolved, the situation was turning further grim with each passing minute. The more details Roger had learned from pressing the police, the less secure he had felt. This was momentous. It was one of the largest heists the city—hell, the country—had ever seen. As the bank’s visible security chief, Roger knew that he was on the hook. And if there was any value imperative to Roger, it was that his good name not be dragged through the mud on any condition. What he was seeing and hearing made him a very unhappy man. Three security staffers stood behind Roger, mirroring the completely despondent look on their boss’s face. They were slowly jacking up their disabled car on the side of the road and inspecting the tires that had been ripped to shreds by two silenced pistol shots. There were two police cruisers present, but Roger watched as a third police squad car sped onto the scene with sirens blaring and burned rubber to decelerate. It parked behind them. Then another squad car arrived. Soon the entire FDR highway was completely blocked off by the NYPD. Red and blue light ricocheted everywhere.

  ■

  Red and blue lights rocketed across the Bitter End as well, a rock spot in Greenwich Village on the other side of the island. Jake Rivett opened his mouth and delivered a manic yell.

  “Yayaayayayaaaaaaa!” Jake’s scream completely overtook any of his band members’ instruments or any audience member’s desire to maintain a coherent conversation with friends. Jake Rivett got in your face with his music. He liked it that way. It kept people off balance, and that was exactly the point. Spit sprayed from Jake’s mouth and coated the microphone in front of his lips as he crushed his latest original screamo track. Twig skinny with blonde spiked hair, an all-leather-and-denim-façade worn skintight, Jake rocked the mic hard.

  “Is anyone out there breaking free of this plastic shell encasing me?” Jake sang, and he truly wanted to know. His band went absolutely nuts on the last line. Jake climbed up a three-foot speaker to the side of the stage and did a backflip off the tower to end the song. He didn’t completely pull it off, under rotating and smashing into the ground with his whole body. But it was the thought that counted. He stood up to greet the crowd.

  There wasn’t much of one. Just a sprinkling of applause greeted Jake and his band at the end of their set. Throughout the dark music venue, Jake noticed a small collection of punk-rock chicks and their boyfriends, a bartender taking care of a couple of winos, and an older couple in a booth. That was it. But the key to turning a hobby into a career was to start and not quit. Because of that, Jake had thrown himself to the ground many times before and would be doing the same again in the future.

  The lackluster crowd didn’t stop Jake and his band from jumping off the stage, hooting and hollering and truly pumped up. A performance was a performance—and also a good night. One was compelled by the spirit of rock n’ roll to act like a rock star while becoming one, even if that placed oneself at the expense of the dream before even getting there. As many wannabe rockers had realized only in hindsight, the efficacy of that philosophy was never clear until many years later. And then it would be crystal clear—hopefully not “crystal meth” clear, but instead, “crystal chandelier” clear.

  Jake immediately headed for his backpack, which was on the ground underneath a side table, when the band’s drummer, Schaub, pulled him away.

  “See those babes at the bar? They know about a party in Brooklyn,” Schaub told him. “We gotta take them up on that, bro.”

  “That’s chill,” Jake replied. He found his cell phone and checked it. There was a missed call. “Shit,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Seriously? It’s midnight.”

  “Assholes never sleep.”

  Jake placed a black motorcycle helmet over his head and walked out of the bar without any further ado. Sometimes it hurt to leave his bandmates high and dry, but they could handle the after hours all by themselves.

  The cold, hard truth was that even if Jake had been in the middle of a song, he would have responded immediately and left the stage. His hobby would remain just that for the time being, because he had his orders. No one is truly obligated by a job. One can always quit. Jake could too. But he never would. Because what he did for a living provided him with even more exhilaration than a couple shots of J.D. and blasting extreme decibels ever could. He could always become a rock star after retirement.

  ■

  Having been beckoned, Jake ripped through the deserted streets of the city on his super-powered Ducati bike. Without activating its blinker, a lumbering delivery truck moved into the lane in front of Jake, almost cutting him off. Jake accelerated past the truck at the last moment. The driver honked and moved up near his tail, just a few feet away. Jake reached behind his back and pulled a crowbar off the back of the bike. He reared back towards the truck and swung the crowbar wildly in the air, gesticulating for the trucker to stay away. Needless to say, the truck backed off.

  Power was a tricky thing. For three years of high school, Jake had attended a military boarding school in upstate New York, where the force of intimidation had been cemented into his young mind. Boarding school had been his father’s idea, which was ironic because his father was the one who taught Jake the most about fear in the first place. Sometimes one didn’t need to actually do anything to get one’s way. Simply projecting a mental image of the horror that was to come compelled many into
submission. That’s not to say that Jake figured out how to use this power for himself. Similar to home, he’d remained the whipping boy in boarding school. After graduation he was just happy to get out of there in one piece and finally make it to the city where he belonged. In the city, he’d succeeded in turning the narrative around. He started going to a Krav Maga gym. As he became more lethal, he felt better. The haze lifted. He started to perform on stage, where he was allowed to be himself. He wasn’t meek—he was aggressive. He didn’t stumble—he stepped forward. He stopped getting bullied by becoming a bully himself. At least some people might describe him that way. But only the bad ones.

  Jake continued to spin through the city. He finally arrived in the front of a tall building in Wall Street. But it wasn’t just any building. Jake strode off the bike, past a police SUV parked at the front door, and into Montgomery Noyes’ headquarters.

  ■

  Jake raced up to the turnstile by the elevators. A security guard eyed Jake’s black-and-denim ensemble with suspicion.

  “Can I help you, sir? This is a private entrance,” the guard asked.

  “Yeah,” Jake retorted. He reached into his pocket. He held up his NYPD detective badge in the surprised guard’s face. “You can bring me up to the twentieth floor.”

  NINE

 

  HOWARD BERGENSEN SAT IN Montgomery’s glass-encased boardroom on the twentieth level, across from Tom Marks. Marks was chief of police, the head honcho of the entire police force for the five boroughs.

  “So this guy—he’s your best?” Howard asked.

  Marks nodded. “Give him a bone and he’ll stomp after it like a rabid pit bull. But he’s like all our undercovers. My only word to the wise is don’t ask him to explain himself.”

  “What does that mean?” Howard asked quizzically.

  At that very moment, Jake Rivett entered the conference room and everyone instantly comprehended Marks’ directive.

  “Gentlemen, this is Rivett,” Chief Marks announced. The rest of the conference table took a beat while they processed Detective Jake Rivett’s outfit and persona. Jake nodded at the table and then launched right into it. He had spent his entire motorcycle ride, even while maniacally swinging the crowbar, on the phone with his team of investigators who were spread out at various sites all over the city.

  “At this moment, we have two hundred units of traffic and aviation out, two SWAT contingents on standby, and major crimes, robbery apprehension and tech working with me out of SID,” Jake said succinctly and confidently. Howard was taken aback for a moment but then leaned in. He was only familiar with detectives who wore suits with horrible thread counts and clashing shirt-tie combinations. But in recent years Howard had seen young men walk through his office in jeans and ratty T-shirts and leave holding fundraising checks worth more than even he could dream of. The world was changing and so were the uniforms. So maybe they could work with this guy. There would be a lot of pain ahead—Howard was sure of it. But what kept him going was the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything in life was a means to an end. This situation was no different.

  “Don’t you have cameras out on the streets?” Howard asked. “On the FDR? Traffic video or whatever you call it?”

  “Indeed. You’re right. The crime was pretty well captured. We’ve got workable angles from seven or eight city cameras and some adjacent shots from others. We’ll also be pulling as much private footage as we can get our hands on. Real Time Crime Center sent over a visual patchwork of the heist—at least what they’ve been able to cobble together so far. It’s quite,” Jake searched for the best word, “sublime.”

  “Highly professional,” Marks added with a nod. Marks always felt the need to explain Jake to others. It had only taken about three years of Jake’s employment before Marks had heard his name for the first time, because one fact kept bubbling up through staff meetings and into the higher echelons of management: They had a newbie detective with zero unsolved cases. But that wasn’t even why he respected Jake. He’d seen numerous stars turn into supernovas and then collapse into their own hubris during his career. And he didn’t love how the kid looked. But as Marks had begun to listen to Jake’s process, hopping from one critical case to the next, and as he learned that Jake’s father had been the chief of police in the state’s capital of Albany, he began to warm to the guy. It didn’t hurt that Jake’s record was still largely unblemished. Of course there was still a case or two on the roster that Jake hadn’t been able to solve. But that was a function of the fact that the hardest cases in the city were being assigned to Rivett regularly.

  “There are five persons of interest,” Jake said. He flipped around a laptop handed to him by one of Marks’ assistants, displaying the video footage from the FDR. Jake controlled the playback as he showed the footage to the assembled executives. “There were two motorcycles involved—two perps on each motorcycle. It looks like a man and woman each. And then there’s the crane. It’s basically ingenious. They picked up that armored car with a magnet, like it was some prize in a coin-operated machine at the boardwalk. In terms of the whois, there’s very few clues about these individuals’ identities. All wore helmets, except for one guy—the driver of the crane rig truck. He’s our mystery man,” Jake said. He paused the video and zoomed in on the magnetic crane rig and flatbed. The side profile of a young Asian man was clearly visible inside the cab of the truck, eyes wide with adrenaline, straight black hair to his shoulders. “Facial algorithms haven’t pulled up a hit yet. Frankly, with the blur and the angle on his face, the databases may never find him. That also assumes that he’s been booked before. The entire heist was an exercise in utter precision, including their escape route,” Jake finished.

  “Why do you say that, exactly?” Howard asked.

  “Because they exited in Mott Haven, which has the distinction of being exactly one ramp beyond our networked municipal cameras,” Jake replied.

  “With four point two tons of our gold,” Howard said.

  “What’s that worth, exactly?” Marks asked.

  Howard Bergensen stared out the window. “A hundred and twenty-seven point one million dollars,” he finally said.

  “The press are going to self-immolate with excitement,” Jake chimed in.

  Howard glared at Rivett.

  “Howard, is your bank prepared to announce the loss?” Marks asked.

  “Immediately. We did nothing wrong—except pick the wrong damned armored-car company,” Howard said as he rotated his laser eyes towards Roger O’Neill and then continued. “My singular interest is our shareholders. We will communicate the truth. Our insurance will cover the loss by the end of the quarter. The robbery doesn’t alter my bottom line by a dollar. But the flash crash . . . affected everyone.”

  “The what?” Marks asked quizzically.

  “Gold market crashed earlier,” Jake added.

  Howard nodded. “That’s the entire reason we were forced to settle up. Normally we don’t actually move the physical gold from our depository. There’s no need. Instead we just mark who owns what at the end of each night. We’ll say, ‘This rack used to be owned by A, but now it’s owned by B.’ But ultimately the clients and other banks we trade with do have the contractual right to take physical delivery if they want to. Gold fell over eight percent yesterday in the flash crash. That’s an abnormal event—total black swan. And the biggest players in the market all know what everyone else is doing, even if by hearsay and innuendo. It’s no secret out there that we were building our gold position up and using leverage to do it. We thought we’d finally reached a solid bottom. So our counterparties got freaked out. We experienced a margin call. A bunch of the organizations that we do business with demanded their physical gold. And that’s why we were moving more gold at one time than we ever had before,” Howard said.

  Jake thought about this. “So no crash, no robbery?”

  “Right,” Howard confirmed.

  “Okay. Then the next logical quest
ion is: What caused the flash crash?” Jake asked.

  “We don’t know yet.” Howard sighed. “We’re actively looking into it, but there’s no guarantees. Maybe we’ll figure it out. But sometimes the market’s too big, and too complicated, for simple answers.”

  “There are a number of plausible options: fat finger, high-frequency malfunction, or something predatory,” a Montgomery lawyer in the back of the room said.

  Howard jumped back in. “The market has no soul. It’s like the sea. You build your ship to be watertight, but a tsunami will still destroy it, drown all the sailors, and not even remember doing it.”