Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  “Is it true what the policeman says about Daddy?” Mikey asked. He was very serious.

  She pulled Mikey in for a warm embrace. “No, honey. Not true. It’s not true at all.” She looked over his shoulder so he couldn’t see the tears running down her face. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay . . .”

  NINETEEN

 

  HE’D DONE EVERYTHING RIGHT. He’d jumped over all of life’s hurdles in sequence with only a momentary quiver or two, but David’s path had inexplicably brought him right back to the start. Was that the truth about fate? Was it stronger than both intense desire and flawless execution combined? David didn’t deserve any of this. In fact, he’d done everything he could to avoid the situation at hand. But life had still reared its ugly head and slapped him silly.

  He played the scenarios out in his head endlessly. The first person he thought about was Howard Bergensen. The impossible was turning real and what Tyler had said in the van didn’t make him feel better at all. Tyler’s information had turned all expectation on its head and provided a horrible premonition of what was to come. If the people whom one aspired to become were just as bad as those one desired to move on from, then what was the point of the journey in the first place? That’s all David could think about. He couldn’t believe that Howard would have this inside him. It pissed him off—somewhat because of what it appeared to be, but more so because of what it meant he didn’t know. The unknown scared him. It also had a worse effect—it popped his bubble. What does one really gain from a place where they’d do this to you? This wasn’t the narrative of the American dream. It was the opposite. David was sleeping inside a nightmare—or trying to. More like lying on a bed with his eyes wide open waiting for his computer to process through Tyler’s Blackberry. He hadn’t been able to catch a wink, and the sun was coming up on a new day. The haze lifted as David finally heard a series of confirming dings emanating from his computer. He sat up, moved to his laptop, and checked.

  The PIN had been cracked—finally.

  David opened the phone and started going through Tyler’s correspondence and files. It wasn’t hard to find what he was looking for. He simply searched for “Tsunami,” and the results piled up. It didn’t surprise David that Tyler wasn’t technical, but it did shock him that Stanton hadn’t even tried to cover his tracks—not that deleting any of the emails would have made any difference. David had an app for that. He browsed through shipping container-manifests, rental agreements, and digital photographs of shipping containers. He pulled up GPS coordinates of the various containers, trying to get a feel for the flow of money and commodities. What was Tsunami doing? The truth was that most of it looked on the up and up.

  A few outliers piqued David’s interest. Tsunami owned approximately two hundred shipping containers. Ninety-five percent of them were located outside of the United States. Of the ten on U.S. soil, five were positioned in the same warehouse adjacent to Port Newark. David pulled up the address of the warehouse on a map. It was operated by a large commercial logistics concern. What was most interesting about these five containers was not only their location and proximity to one another and New York, but they were also the only vacant containers of the entire fleet. They weren’t currently being rented out to third parties. They were just sitting there in New Jersey, in an anonymous building with load-in and load-out privileges.

  David stood. Vlad would be thrilled to hear the results of the hacking. But first he had to make sure that Vlad was going to uphold his side of the bargain. He needed to talk to Marina.

  ■

  Marina brewed coffee and mixed eggs in her kitchen. She stared through the kitchen window at two unmarked police cars parked obviously at the end of her driveway. She sighed.

  Then she spotted Cat Zhadanov and her daughter walking up the sidewalk with a set of animal balloons blown into cartoonish characters of a sheep, a lion, and a crocodile. Marina smiled.

  A few minutes later, Mikey and Cat’s daughter Alina played with the balloons at one end of the living room while Marina sat with Cat on the couch.

  “Honey,” Cat leaned in and whispered conspiratorially to Marina, “go into the bathroom. Turn on the water. You only have a minute.” Cat held out a mobile phone. She tossed it into Marina’s lap, almost disturbing her cup of coffee. A call was already on. “It’s David,” Cat said quietly.

  Marina cradled the phone and rushed for the bathroom. She would take Cat up on her offer. Screw Jake Rivett. Once she was in the bathroom, Marina asked, “Baby?”

  “Hey Mair. It’s okay. It’s okay . . . It’s me. Are you alright?” David asked.

  “The cops are staked out here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “They searched the house—again,” she told him.

  “For what?”

  “No idea. Wigs, or masks or something . . .”

  “Wigs?” he asked.

  “That’s what I said. Didn’t make any sense. What are you doing?” she insisted.

  “I’m close to figuring it out. I’m going to find out who hurt us. They won’t be able to get away with this . . .”

  “But what’s it going to do to you?” she asked.

  Marina could only sigh as she listened to David respond on the phone. As hard as he tried to explain his mindset, she didn’t think he was making a lot of sense. He thought that somehow he could break this thing wide open all by himself. That was the thing about David. The contrasting force to his raw intelligence was an often stunning naïveté regarding the ways of the world. Or maybe one could call it relentless optimism. The result of such unhedged optimism was that he would succeed in leaps and bounds, but always take steps back—always. It wasn’t entirely his fault. He was the product of his ambition mixed with his origin. Marina and David were the same in that way, and that’s part of the reason why they loved each other.

  ■

  The mark of a calmly gentrifying neighborhood, a non-descript cable installation van sat down the street from the Belovs’ house. Inside of this van, however, was a device that Marina would never know she needed to worry about: a Stingray. The military and intelligence communities seemed especially adept at finding aggressive animal names to label their latest devices. The Stingray was just a black box the size of a desktop computer. But when used correctly, its power was shocking. The Stingray could scoop up any cell phone conversation within a given radius. It would essentially cut in between the phone and the network without the person talking knowing they were being spoofed. When someone connects to a Wi-Fi signal, such as at a coffee shop, he or she must actively select that network. But that’s not true for a phone connection. Phones simply indicate “Verizon” or “AT&T” at the top of the screen, and users take their cell connectivity completely for granted. The Stingray was its own cell phone tower. Any phone within the Stingray’s radius would automatically connect to it first, instead of whatever carrier the phone normally connected to. The Stingray would then forward the phone to their default carrier. The target would still be able to make phone calls, send emails, and send texts. But without the user knowing, everything he or she did was being recorded.

  In this case, the Stingray’s target was Marina. Villalon operated it inside the van while Jake sat next to him, monitoring the feed. David and Marina’s conversation fed through the system and out a small speaker.

  “I’m going to figure everything out, baby. You have to trust me,” David said.

  “Baby . . . I have to know,” Marina asked, “Did you do this?”

  “Absolutely not. Never! If you know me then you absolutely know that’s the truth,” David paused for a moment, then continued. “Do you remember where we went for our second date. Summer after junior year?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Meet me there tonight—at one. Go through the garage window in the back. Take the Petrolitos’ car. She leaves the key on her left tire, remember?”

  Inside the van, Jake and Tony exchanged the look of two hung
ry coyotes at the end of a hunt. Sometimes law enforcement was too easy. That’s sort of why Jake enjoyed it. Most of the targets he was set off against were halfway oblivious like Marina, taking piecemeal protective measures but not nearly enough. Or his perps were dumb enough to be career criminals, which meant their lack of critical thinking would eventually cause their own demise. And because Jake liked it, he was good at it. He continued to listen.

  “Where are you, baby?” Marina asked.

  The detectives listened with bated breath for David’s response.

  TWENTY

  DAVID WAS IN FACT standing on a raised parking lot about a mile from Port Newark, watching cranes unloading shipping vessels like dystopian animals pacing across a multicolor container city. This was the raw underbelly of industry, and not just for New York. Port Newark represented the entire Eastern Seaboard’s mouth, ready and open for consumption.

  While David spoke to Marina, Vlad made a “finish it up” motion with hands. David noticed.

  “The minute’s up. I gotta go, honey,” he said without revealing his location. He hung up. He wasn’t exactly thrilled, but he was hopeful. At least he had been able to speak to the woman he loved and make her certain that he was alive and well.

  David observed Vlad and Baranowski as they stared across the warehouse district with their binoculars. Even though Marina hadn’t said it outright, it was clear to David that she didn’t approve of what he was doing. Eventually he’d find out if she was right. A gnawing feeling had slowly begun to nibble at his soul. Perhaps there was another way than Vlad’s. The problem was that he couldn’t see it clearly yet. No road is without forks, and David knew that there were certainly options along the path ahead. One option was Jake Rivett. Jake wasn’t quite an olive branch, but he was more than nothing. Could David tell Jake about Tsunami? Would it matter? It wasn’t entirely clear. David had been waiting to find the right time to approach Jake again, even though their first encounter had gone so badly. But David was an optimistic man. Jake would understand—eventually. He had to, especially if David could show him hard proof.

  “I have a good feeling about this. How ’bout you?” Vlad asked David.

  “Never thought I’d be breaking and entering . . .” David pondered.

  “The ends justify the means. You want your proof? It’ll be in there.”

  As David stared out over the city of storage containers, he realized that he might only be a few miles away from the smoking gun he’d been searching for all this time.

  ■

  After the sun set, a Ford Bronco rumbled down a street parallel to the razor-wire fence protecting the series of storage warehouses from the public. The Bronco parked on the shoulder, outside the gates. Baranowski’s face was illuminated through the windshield by the small flame of a lighter for a brief second, as if he was lighting a cigarette. Then Baranowski jumped out of the Bronco and briskly walked away down the street. He fell into a shadow and disappeared. A few seconds later, the Bronco began to burn from the inside. The combustion was swift. Within moments the car metamorphosed into a massive bonfire, and finally, after the heat had sufficiently expanded various internal oils, the truck exploded into a fiery supernova of glass and shrapnel. An abandoned vehicle, susceptible to arson by a wandering transient—that’s how the local news would categorize the incident on the airwaves later. But unknown to them, it was also something else. It was a diversion.

  David and Vlad observed the flames from the other side of the facility. Three security SUVs raced across the massive yard towards the ball of fire half a mile away. The coast was clear. Vlad and David pulled on black balaclavas and scrambled towards the fence. Vlad grabbed a pair of wire cutters from a large internal backpack strapped to his back. Snip. Snip. Snip.

  Vlad and David crept towards their target warehouse and crouched behind a pile of fencing supplies. They checked the building’s perimeter—no visible windows. Each storage bay consisted of a reinforced rolling steel door with Series 2000-brand locks that could easily withstand a bullet round or sledgehammer.

  “You have the torch cutter, right? Should we just go around the locks?” David asked.

  “It’ll take too long. And there’s five doors to get through,” Vlad said while he scanned the warehouse. “They have cameras on the loading bays. So I got a better idea: We go in the back door,” Vlad said. He pointed towards a small side door that permitted staff access to the inside of the warehouse.

  “See the alarm box next to it?” David asked. He had noticed two small grey pipes emerging from the ground and entering the side of the building.

  “Ya. Shit,” Vlad said.

  “If we snip the circuit, power stops running. It’ll have a built-in stopgap. Alarm goes off when it stops receiving power,” David said. Then David noticed an outdoor electrical outlet. “Screwdriver?” he said. Vlad handed the tool to him. “Ready?”

  “You got this? You’re sure?”

  “Alarms are real low on the totem pole,” David said as he grinned.

  “That’s funny, coming out of your mouth.”

  “Desperate times can change a man,” David replied.

  “Well, let’s do it, pal.”

  David and Vlad scampered towards the warehouse’s side entrance. David went to work on the outlet. He got the plate off and pulled out the outlet housing. He finally found what he was looking for: A small circuit board with an electrolytic capacitor. “I’ll splice the alarm back into this circuit. Then cut the wire. The power will still flow into the alarm, so it won’t trigger. But it will be unable to communicate that it’s been snipped,” he said.

  “You always were the best,” Vlad said, observing David with respect.

  David stripped the wires, prepared the transistor, connected one to the other, and then powered the circuit. He snipped the alarm wire and nothing happened.

  “Thank gawd,” Vlad grinned as he pulled out a portable drill. He spun out the hinges of the industrial door. Within a few seconds, the last hinge was freed. David and Vlad eased the freestanding door down slowly.

  Inside the warehouse, they quietly paced past numerous bays before reaching their intended targets: five red containers in a row. The containers’ doors did not face them. They were oriented towards the loading bay for obvious reasons. Vlad pulled his backpack off and placed it on the ground. He pulled out an acetylene cutting torch with two tanks of gas.

  “Help me up,” Vlad commanded. David hunched down. Vlad stepped on his back and placed the torch on top of the container. Then he climbed up. Situated above the container, Vlad engaged the torch. After a few minutes, he cut a two-foot hole in the top of the container, making sure to prevent the loose steel piece from falling through. He ignited his flashlight and peered into the container. “Empty,” Vlad announced sullenly. He passed the torch down to David.

  “Gimme the welder,” Vlad said.

  David reached into Vlad’s backpack. He tossed a welding iron and large protective mask up to Vlad, who proceeded to quickly weld the hole shut. The repair wouldn’t stand up to massive scrutiny, but a cursory or uninformed inspection would miss Vlad’s handiwork for months to come.

  They repeated the process for the next two containers, but both were empty as well.

  “You think we’re kicked?” David asked.

  “Don’t lose hope, my peach.”

  Vlad cut a hole in the top of the fourth container and shined his flashlight through. “David,” he announced, “get into my belly.”

  David climbed up the side of the container. He and Vlad carefully hung from the sides of the hole before dropping gently into the container. They each turned on flashlights.

  The two of them were greeted by an enormous industrial machine. The machine filled two thirds of the container and was sided with Japanese lettering. It was befuddling to Vlad and David, and certainly not the smoking gun that either of them had been looking for. This was one of those moments when the pieces of the puzzle begin to fill themselves in and the pictu
re that’s being drawn on top isn’t what anyone had expected to see.

  “What the shit is this thing? Fuckin’ useless,” Vlad said. He angrily pounded the side of the machine with his fist.

  “It’s in Japanese . . .”

  “Ya. I can appreciate the letters on it too, but ya know what? I don’t actually read Japanese. And more importantly, it’s not gold,” Vlad said.

  David investigated the rest of the container. “Okay. Well, first of all, there isn’t supposed to be anything inside this box,” David said, which was true, but also irrelevant to Vlad.

  “So what?” Vlad asked.

  “So they’re hiding it. Shine over here.”

  Vlad complied with his flashlight: Two portable power generators, an abandoned laptop, and a scale were scattered nearby. Waste bins surrounded the area, filled with fast food remains.

  “Someone’s been holed up in here,” Vlad said.

  David inspected the machine further. “Have you ever made Jell-O before?” David asked. “I have a feeling that’s what this does. It’s a die caster. Pour gold into one end and out of the other . . .” David reached for a panel at the end of the machine. He flipped a handle and pulled up on the panel to reveal ten gold bars lined up in racks inside the machine.

  “New bars. With new serial numbers.”

  “Wow. There she is. But where’s the rest of it?”

  David shrugged. Vlad flashed the corners of the garage with his flashlight, and then brought it back to the bars.

  All of a sudden, they both heard a noise at the end of the container that was exposed to the loading bay outside. Vlad extinguished his flashlight just as the back door to the container opened. He and David shimmied around the side of the hulking machine, climbed up the back end, and quietly exited the container.

  After replacing the warehouse door and its hinges in the dark, Vlad and David scrambled along the side of the building. They crept a few hundred yards away to see a black van parked outside the loading bay. The fourth red container had been unlocked and was open. A few men stood inside it, pulling gold bars out of the smelting machine. After a while, a large, heavy black case was lowered to the ground and subsequently loaded into the black van by the mysterious men. After a few more seconds of conversation, the men secured the container and jumped into the black van. The van departed from the logistics facility.