Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  “I don’t sell that! I don’t know!” Guo replied, raising his voice back.

  “Goddammit.” Jake expelled all the pressure inside by slamming Guo against the mirror. The mirror cracked, and pieces of it began to fall down to the floor. Guo collapsed back down to the floor.

  “You happy?” Guo asked him.

  Jake stared at his reflection against the mirror. He thought he knew who he was, but the pieces were still splintering around him. He’d spent his whole life trying to keep the mirror from changing, but he couldn’t stop it. That’s how everyone is. By the time they’ve seen their reflection, they’ve already become someone else.

  Then Jake heard a small whimper. He looked down. It wasn’t Guo, whose body had suddenly metamorphosed into a rock-solid state of panic.

  “What was that?” Jake asked.

  Guo started to stand up. “Huh? You need to get out of here. I’m going to tell Sunny.”

  “No. The noise . . .”

  “No noise. Maybe my mirror crashing.”

  Jake heard it again. It sounded like a sob—or a rat trying to scrape against the back of the mirror. Or both. He pushed Guo out of the way and placed his ear to the wall. He heard it again. He knocked with his hand. He heard another knock back. Jake pulled his gun and aimed it directly at Guo. “Sit down,” Jake commanded Guo, who followed his orders, a miserable look cast upon his face.

  Jake examined the wall. He realized that it was framed in by external two-by-fours. The construction was strange, as if the wall was missing half its wallboard. Still holding his gun, Jake let out an enormous scream. He lifted his leg and slammed it as hard as he could into the interior wall, which shuddered back a few inches. Jake could tell that something was hidden back there. After another kick, the fake wall swung open to the inside. Jake suddenly stared into the eyes of twenty extremely filthy, illegal Chinese immigrants stored in a room about the size of a walk-in closet.

  ■

  A few hours later, Guo’s massage shop was swimming with cops. Villalon stood outside with Jake. They’d just finished loading Guo into an NYPD paddy wagon idling on the street.

  “It’s a huge bust,” Tony said.

  “Not what we were looking for,” Jake replied.

  “Makes you look good.”

  “This whole thing is turning into a stupid wild-goose chase. I’m starting to believe we’re not going to find anything down here,” Jake said.

  “Don’t trust your instinct?” Tony asked.

  Jake grinned at him. Villalon had grown up perfectly middle class and had never broken the speed limit. The guy didn’t know his instinct from his elbow, but he was a solid cop. “Keep searching the internet for me, Tony. Buy as many of those pieces of crap as you can on eBay or wherever you can find them, and let’s pray that one of them looks like ours.”

  “Will do. We’re also searching every home improvement store in seven states for the steel cutter.”

  “All right,” Jake said. He turned and then glanced back at Tony. “We’re too on the nose. There’s something I’m missing—and it’s everything. It’s the critical element.”

  “On the nose breaks cases,” Villalon replied with a shrug.

  “No—just mirrors,” Jake retorted.

  As Jake leaned over to check his motorcycle, he heard commotion down the street. He looked up and was blessed with the rare sight of Sunny’s five hundred lumbering pounds standing outside Palace. Jake had never even seen Sunny standing up before. Five of Guo’s employees had materialized from the various businesses of the street. All young men in their late teens and twenties, they kneeled in a line on the sidewalk in front of Sunny. Jake was fascinated. He couldn’t take his eyes off the genuflecting ritual. Sunny focused directly on Jake, who kept his eyeline locked. Sunny wound up and slapped one of the men, like a windmill to the face. The man collapsed to the ground. Sunny stepped left and hit the next one. In quick succession, he smacked the crap out of each of his henchmen. They didn’t fight back. They didn’t look up. They remained on the wet cement underneath Sunny like a pack of whipping boys, which was exactly what they were. He stared directly at Jake. Then Sunny opened his mouth and spoke. “Get out of here, Mr. New York.”

  Jake did just that. He jetted the hell out of the belly of the beast in search of a song more beautiful.

  ■

  At the very same moment, David Belov was blowing chow all over a drain on the side of the road in Brooklyn. Vlad waited for him patiently by the car.

  “You see, my peach? Bankers,” Vlad said with a grin.

  David looked as though he was going to be sick again.

  “You okay?”

  David nodded, but his face was white.

  “You can handle this. I know you can. And if you can’t? I don’t know what to tell you. I warned ya,” Vlad said.

  “I need to see my family,” David said.

  “I get that you’re pissed. But your cell phones, your landline, computer, e-mail . . . The police will have bugged it all,” Vlad said.

  “I wasn’t asking, Vlad. I have to see Marina. I have to talk to her, tell her that I’m okay, and promise her that we’re figuring this out,” David replied.

  “I’ll do something to get you guys together. But you gotta give me a little time, ya? And while I’m on that, it’s time to get to work on that villain’s Blackberry.”

  ■

  Back in Konstantin’s safe house studio apartment, David reached for Tyler’s Blackberry. He sat down at the small desk, where a laptop had been set up for him. He hooked up Tyler’s phone via a USB cord to another device laying on the desk—a PIN hacker. David was very familiar with the device, having developed a similar one in college for his CS 201 class. The PIN hacker was about the size of a pack of cards, with two inputs and a power cord. One input entered the Blackberry device. The other was attached to David’s computer, where he ran a command-and-control application. The first thing the PIN hacker did was circumvent the BIOS, the phone chip’s operating system. It tricked the system into disregarding its self-destruct mechanism following the entry of ten incorrect passwords. This prevented the phone from erasing itself. Then the PIN hacker began to parse through billions of possible numeric unlocking combinations, anywhere from four to ten digits long. Tens of thousands of options processed through the phone every second. Although the numbering choices were statistically chosen, with the most common combinations first, David still had no way of knowing when he’d break through Tyler’s encryption. The breakthrough could occur in thirty seconds, or it could take a few days.

  David stood. As the application hustled along, he shuffled to the small bathroom sink. He washed his face while staring at himself in the mirror. He imagined how Marina would feel if she saw him like this. Boiling with hate, most likely. And what about Mikey? David couldn’t even bear contemplating the notion. He abruptly stepped away from the bathroom. He didn’t want to see himself anymore. He paced back and forth across the room. After a while, he looked at the laptop—still nothing. David finally lay down on the tiny bed with its minimal thread count. Stiff as a board, David stared up. The off-white surface of the ceiling was illuminated only by the listless digital glow of the workhorse computer to his left. The blurry numbers filtering above taunted him. He was deadly tired, having not slept in two days. He was also completely unable to sleep.

  SIXTEEN

 

  BY THE TIME THEY were sophomores at New Utrecht High School, David and Vlad rarely hung out. They’d still chat whenever they passed one another in the halls, or if Vlad needed an injection of knowledge regarding European history. But their interests had diverged to the point where they weren’t even in the same hallways any longer.

  The municipal funding regime had financed a new computer lab down in the basement and had filled it with ten brand-spanking-new computers that none of the students used. They sat in all their boring glory like expensive paperweights. Not a single kid at New Utrecht would be caught dead t
here. Social media didn’t exist, and internet browsing was in its infancy. Encouraged by his math teacher, David Belov had been the only student interested in the lab. He loved getting lost in the programming software that was preloaded onto the computers. He found the positive feedback loop of inputting instructions and receiving immediate results to be very addictive. Besides the fact that David wasn’t interested in miscreant activity any longer, the computers held most of his attention and were the main reason that he didn’t cross paths with Vlad. As one might imagine, Vlad would never have volunteered to sit in front of a CRT monitor for hours. But David loved it. He found himself exploring the inner workings of the machine as he used to explore Gravesend and Coney Island. He’d watch tutorials on CD-ROM relentlessly, trying to replicate the coding described until his shoulders ached. At first he had to follow directions, but eventually David became fluent in the programming languages he was learning. He started with tiny little text programs. Then he created calculators for various types of math problems. Eventually he coded an algorithm that would allow anyone to calculate the area underneath a curve, and another that rendered 3-D boxes complete with lighting effects. And that was all within the first year.

  ■

  On the other hand, the only element of school that still held any of Vlad’s interest was basketball. He was a pretty good shot. More importantly, he was a consistent and skillful bruiser. The varsity basketball team’s coach loved him for it. But even the coach couldn’t overlook the preseason afternoon when Vlad shaved an incoming freshman’s head and tried to stuff the poor kid into a locker room. Vlad was relieved of his duty as a player on the team by the school’s principal, and his future in team sports ended.

  When one door closes, another opens. Around the same time as Vlad’s unceremonious departure from the basketball team, he had begun to refine his natural boxing skills. Vlad had developed his fighting acumen in the wild, as it were. But having perfected his ability to rumble like an animal, he began to channel his energy towards a more professional version of the same pursuit. If basketball wasn’t going to save him, then a nascent boxing career certainly might.

  It helped that his father owned the boxing gym on Cropsey. Vlad began to spend the majority of his time there. Each afternoon he would walk over after school, followed without fail by his growing crew of scalawags. Vlad’s crew had grown past the amiable Baranowski to include the brothers Roschin and Petrov. His dad’s gym was a business, but it was also a de facto clubhouse for Arseni and his “people” to hang out. This was especially true after Arseni built a sauna in the back of the building. The older men spent a little time boxing and a lot of time bullshitting. It didn’t go unnoticed to Arseni’s colleagues that all of their sons and sons’ friends considered Vlad their leader. They’d seen what boys like Vlad grew up and became. They didn’t have to look any further than Arseni for this inspiration. Like father, like son.

  Vlad’s high school years were actually the most peaceful of his life. After a year or two in the gym, it was established that he was a boxing prodigy. He was regularly destroying eighteen and nineteen-year-olds and turning all of Arseni’s other top prospects on their heads. Only greatness lay ahead. That’s when Vlad was first gripped by the power of the dream. Maybe he could work incredibly hard in order to get himself in a position to be incredibly lucky. Maybe he’d be able to make the jump. Vlad could be the kid who got out of Bensonhurst—the one people would talk about forever—the bear cub that made it in the world. And the boxing ring was going to be the arena in which he would make that happen.

  ■

  In the early spring of his junior year, David had perfected his abilities with the most advanced programming language he’d tried his hand at: C++. But he was becoming bored. He was tired of writing little sideshow programs that even his teachers were no longer able to debug. He was also starting to look forward in life. He wanted to figure out how he could use his skills in the future—in the real world. While browsing Wired magazine’s first version of an internet presence, David read an article about robots that were being developed by researchers in Japan. He found a computer-controlled robot kit on Amazon and begged his physics teacher to purchase it for the school. A few weeks later, David’s request was granted.

  Thus started New Utrecht’s first robotics club. David was the inaugural and only member at the time, although he was eventually able to scrape up a few of the other techies in the place and force them to pay attention. They were a motley crew. There weren’t many and they weren’t particularly polished. One of the kids in the club forgot to wear underwear to school multiple times a year. They weren’t even talented engineers—but they were nerds with passion, and that counted for a lot. Although it took them until almost the end of the semester, the robotics club eventually assembled a slightly humanoid robot that would respond to digital commands from a controller. Their machine could accomplish simple tasks for its human masters, like holding up a book and turning the pages or opening a root beer bottle. Even though it was far more efficient for David to open his own soda pop, he was thrilled with the club’s accomplishments. And for the first time in his life, he was the leader of the pack.

  There was one final propitious event that occurred during the second half of the school year. David’s physics teacher was under pressure from the school administration to justify the four-thousand-dollar cost of the robotics kit and signed the club up for a science fair in Atlantic City. The event was scheduled to take place during the last week of the school year. Putting aside the fact that their machine was at the developmental age of toddler, David and his team were pumped. With its bottle-opening skill already hard coded, the club decided that a “couch potato” theme would be entertaining. They spent three more weeks using code to cajole the robot into pressing a television remote and then moved on to sandwich preparation. They succeeded in training their robot to make a full sandwich, albeit a dry one. No matter how delicately they calibrated the machine, they simply weren’t successful in making their robot squeeze out mustard or ketchup in a reasonable manner.

  ■

  Emotional moments achieve permanence in one’s memory banks. The first notable moment at the fair was the New Utrecht Robotics Club’s arrival on the floor of the giant arched-ceiling convention center in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Everyone on the team proudly donned their admission lanyards and matching blue polo shirts that they’d scrounged up through school bake sales. Even Veronika had gotten off her butt and made some Rice Krispies treats for David to sell. David felt quite official in his new duds. As the team walked into the massive convention center space, they truly felt that they’d arrived. It was only after they’d set up the robot that David took a breather to look around at the other clubs and began to realize how completely outmatched they were. A handful of clubs were using the exact same robot kit as theirs. But most of the machines on the floor were completely custom built, some to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. David’s competitors were far past bake sales. Even the robots that were based off his kit were incredibly advanced. They put his to shame. The machines were powered by solar panels on their shoulders. They could walk to a bicycle, saddle up, and cycle around the convention center without colliding into anyone. They didn’t require a wired connection. A handful of them were designed to utilize artificial intelligence strategies. One of the robots had actually been jury-rigged into a helicopter drone that flew around the rafters of the convention center and fed live video to a public website.

  David was stunned. At first he thought he had simply failed—that he wasn’t smart enough to compete with the big boys. But eventually he came to understand that sometimes brainpower isn’t enough. He was proud of his polo shirt, but some of the teams had entire sets of matching apparel down to their duffel bags. He was precious when it came to his robot. The majority of the groups possessed multiple builds of the same cyborg, just in case their primary model began to malfunction. David presumed that he was just as smart as some of the
se kids from the green suburbs of New Jersey and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but he didn’t have his hands on nearly as many resources as they did. That made all the difference. That’s why the New Utes didn’t win any medals in Atlantic City. In the end it didn’t come down to skill or math. David realized in this moment that in order to get what he wanted from life, it wasn’t about how he played the game. It all depended on his ability to tip the playing field in his favor.

  ■

  However powerful this realization was, and however lasting, it was not the most important thing that happened to David at the science fair. A few days beforehand, David had learned that his club would be traveling with another group from a different high school in Bensonhurst. The two teachers had put their heads together and concluded that they could save money by renting one school bus for both teams to share. That meant that David and his nerdy handful of robotics experts were on a bus to and from New Jersey with a group of five girls from Lafayette High School.

  The girls’ presentation was about biology, with an esoteric subject matter regarding the power of moss in the jungle. On the bus, one of them rabidly explained how easy it was to classify the mammal taxonomy of a forest area based on the moss within that environment. Most of the spiel was lost on David, because he didn’t care nearly as much about animals as he did about numbers. The girls from Lafayette also found themselves equally outmatched by their competition in Atlantic City and, although they might not have readily admitted it, equally disheartened.

  As excited as both groups had been beforehand, it wasn’t the most auspicious performance for either school. But the ride home was interesting, and not because the teachers decided to stop at Wendy’s afterwards. David had noticed one of the girls in the beginning of the day—the one who didn’t say much but seemed just as engrossed by the topic she was presenting as David was with his robot. David was not a ladies’ man. He left that skill to Vlad, who would boast about his exploits on a daily basis in the lunchroom. The sociological wave of adolescence and flirtation had already passed by the time David was in junior year, and he was positioned at the back end of it. Although he was late to the game, at least David had started to realize that the opposite sex existed. What that really meant was that even though he wanted a girlfriend, David had no idea how to accomplish that feat. He leaned over to her when they were both waiting for their hamburger orders and muttered, “Do you like ketchup?”