Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  “Where do you think they’re headed?” David asked.

  “I dunno. But wherever that is, we’re going along for the ride,” Vlad replied.

  ■

  The van raced northeast, over the Newark Bay Bridge, and then up the New Jersey Turnpike. Vlad and David followed in Vlad’s black Mercedes, making sure to keep a safe trailing distance of no less than three or four cars at all times. They expected to end up somewhere near Jersey City or New Rochelle. But the black van passed through New Jersey. It actually seemed to be headed towards the Holland Tunnel. This was unexpected. One would not naturally figure that the best place to bring hot gold was back towards the jurisdiction it had been stolen from. But then again, nothing about this heist had been normal.

  “No way. The city?” David asked.

  “Sure as shit,” Vlad replied succinctly.

  They followed the black van under the tunnel and into Manhattan. It continued to maintain a course south before finally reaching the Financial District. They turned down Cherry Street as they followed it.

  “Uh . . .” David muttered. The black van’s blinker was on. It turned right towards the delivery entrance of a large building ahead. The steel mesh gate at the base of the building’s loading zone grinded up, and the van disappeared into the depths of the building.

  “Where are we exactly?” Vlad asked. David had a pale-white look on his face. Vlad noticed immediately. “Spit it out, my peach,” he commanded.

  “That’s the bank . . .”

  “The bank?” Vlad asked.

  “My bank,” David replied. He pointed to the glowing words of the Montgomery Noyes nameplate atop the main atrium entrance and both of their jaws dropped simultaneously.

  TWENTY-ONE

  LATE THAT EVENING, DAVID sat at a large table in the gym’s office amidst Vlad, Baranowski, Konstantin, and the brothers Roschin and Petrov.

  “Howard Bergensen is sitting on a couple tons of stolen gold.” Vlad was steaming mad. He twirled the tip of a large hunting knife on his finger as he spoke. “And we are going to take it.” Vlad slid the knife across the desk, sanding off a tiny layer, before flipping it up in the air and catching it.

  “Impossible,” David replied.

  “Anything is possible. I become the President is possible—but less so,” Vlad said flippantly. “It’s not a coincidence that the bars went right back into the place they were stolen from. It’s not a fluke that Howard Bergensen controls a company that shipped a smelting machine from Japan over to Port Newark, just in time for the robbery. Old bars with old serial numbers go in. New ones come out that are completely different. None of it’s random. It is, however, one of the most amazing and brazen plans I have ever come across. Gives me a lil’ more respect for your kind, David.”

  “I didn’t mean that. We will never get into that building, so I’d stop thinking about it. The vault is three basements deep. I’ve only seen it once—on an employee tour. The whole thing is air-locked and guarded by cameras, people, and sensors. It’s designed so that you literally can’t even walk into it. There’s these series of robots inside that do all the commodity moving from command-line prompts,” David said.

  “Ya, ya . . . Not a problem,” Vlad said.

  “How is that not a problem?”

  Vlad flipped the knife again. It rotated four times before he expertly caught it by the handle. “Because the guy who stole this stuff can’t complain if it gets stolen again. ’Cause then he’ll go down. This is what everyone in my business looks for. It’s the perfect crime. How can your man Howard do anything if the gold gets stolen? He can’t, and he won’t.”

  “We still don’t know that Howard is aware the gold’s back in the vault,” David retorted.

  Vlad simply began to laugh. “Sometimes your naïveté obeys no bounds, my peach. Everything—all of this—it all comes back to Howard Bergensen. I know that when there’s smoke, there’s fire. You talk about edges all the time, and now you’re staring one directly in the face. And this isn’t just for me. This is for you.” Vlad pointed the knife directly at David. “This saves your life. You know how you’re going to protect Mikey?”

  “How?”

  “Money. With money, my friend, you can move out of New York and pay for Mikey’s medical bills without a blink. Be set up for the rest of your life. Shit. Live in Costa Rica and meet me in Bermuda so the kids can hang out again, ya know?”

  “What if there’s another way?” David asked.

  “And what might that be?”

  “We take what we know and we tell the police. I don’t want to be a fugitive all my life,” David said.

  “And what exactly are you going to tell your friend Mr. Rivett? That you assaulted your co-worker with a taser, stole his possessions, and burgled a warehouse in Port Newark? You became convinced that Howard Bergensen, at the very tip-top of one of the biggest investment banks in the country, orchestrated a physical gold robbery? He’ll laugh you out of his office with just enough time to arrest you in the hallway.” Vlad paused to collect himself. “I told you exactly what was going to happen when this started. I said that people were going to die over this. Maybe they still will. I just don’t want that person to be you, pal. You’re with me now. There’s only one course of action that will work for everyone, and it’s mine,” Vlad said.

  “We were lucky at the container warehouse, but the vault . . . You won’t succeed,” David said, steaming up inside.

  “David, we’ve both changed a lot.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Let me explain a couple things. You know this gym doesn’t make a lot of money, right?”

  David nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  “I don’t have a job. It’s been a bunch of years since I was in jail, but I haven’t sustained even a scratch from law enforcement since—”

  “I don’t need to know what you do, Vlad. I’m well aware of your proclivities,” David retorted.

  “Don’t assume. You think that all we do is cart drugs around and store prostitutes in safe houses. But I’ve changed—just like you, David. All of us have.” Vlad gestured to the crew around him. “We’re different now. We’re sophisticated. The reason I was so confused about who took out the gold carriage . . . Normally that would be me. You are looking at the best crew of second-story men that exist on the face of this Earth. Maybe Montgomery’s vault is impossible to get into. But if there is anyone who will try—and who can succeed—it’s us.”

  “I’m going out—for a walk,” David replied. “I need to think about this.” He stepped towards the door.

  “No. Sit down and hang out with your friends. We have a lot of planning to do,” Vlad replied sharply. David stopped at the door, and then turned, eye to eye with Vlad. Vlad jacked the knife blade deep into the wood table. “Sit the hell down!”

  But David did not sit. He left the building and slammed the door behind him. He needed time to think. But more importantly, he had a date.

  TWENTY-TWO

 

  AFTER A MONTH OF grieving for his father, Vlad received a christening in the realities of self-sufficiency. In addition to preparing for his upcoming fight without Arseni by his side, Vlad and his mother had begun to contend with major financial stress. The boxing gym had a significant amount of bills to pay. None of the fellas who did business with Arseni seemed to know if, or where, any of his money was. Vlad found their apparent sudden amnesia to be quite suspicious. He’d been thrown into the deep end of the pool at nineteen years old, suddenly and without warning, only to realize that it was treacherous water filled with sharks.

  There was only seven thousand dollars in the family bank account, which didn’t make sense, considering the thousands of dollars of rent Arseni had been paying for the boxing gym and their house combined. Before he passed away, Arseni had handed Vlad a list of people who either owed or were holding money for him, along with the amounts owed. It was close to half a million dollars—a fortune in Vlad’s eyes
, more than he could ever imagine his father being worth. Vlad needed to get his hands on that cash soon. Rent was coming due, and there were many other expenses to pay, including his transportation and lodging at the match up in Stamford.

  Vlad’s life was still not preordained. Even though Arseni’s colleagues weren’t being very forthcoming regarding their debts, Vlad did his best to push the list out of his mind. He had bigger fish to fry. He had a future. He would win eighty thousand dollars if he won the IBF fight. He’d worry about the financial obligations when he got back, or he’d win and he wouldn’t have to worry about anything at all. Vlad did his best to train hard. Roschin’s uncle Axel took the reins of preparation. Axel was much less refined than Arseni, but he had done and seen it all. They both knew they had a lot of work ahead of them. Vlad’s opponent was a black kid named Cameron North, from Florida, who looked like an absolute monster on all the videos that Vlad had managed to scrounge up.

  ■

  The match was hard fought. Vlad kept up with Cam. Neither man had knocked the other out when the fifth round came along. Vlad hadn’t lost, but he certainly wasn’t winning. Cam’s pressure was constant, his attacks relentless, and his blows just shy of crushing. Vlad spent his time backing up, on the ropes, defending himself. In the middle of the fifth round, Cam tapped Vlad with a right jab to the head. Vlad spun to his right, into the ropes. He turned and saw the second shot coming from the left side. It was a mean hook, launched with all the power of Cam’s shoulders and rotating core. Cam’s eyes peered far past Vlad, aiming into the stands for maximum devastating impact. Amazingly, Vlad was able to duck the punch. He parried down and away from the blow, his head missing the kid’s fist by just a hair. Cam’s boxing glove impacted squarely with Vlad’s shoulder, and that’s when Vlad heard the tearing of cartilage and bone. He began screaming. He dropped to the ground, his shoulder unhinged from its joint. The referee jumped in between them immediately as Vlad writhed in agony on the floor. Axel and two emergency medical technicians came running to help him. They popped his shoulder back into the joint while Vlad bellowed in excruciating pain. He could barely hear the EMTs speaking.

  “We need you in the ambulance and to the hospital if you ever want to use your arm again,” the EMT droned. Vlad had just enough capacity on the gurney to watch Cam’s hand being raised in the center of the ring. Vlad had lost. Orthopedic surgery was required on his shoulder, and he would have a year of major rehabilitation and therapy ahead. Vlad was told in no uncertain terms that the match in Connecticut was the last professional boxing match that he would ever participate in.

  ■

  After he returned home from the hospital, Vlad bought his first gun. The gym had fallen into disarray with Axel running the show, and the building’s landlord began to pressure Vlad for two months of back rent. Vlad didn’t have the money. Neither he nor his mother knew how to extricate themselves from the financial whirlpool they had fallen into. Vlad’s mother had done her part, and Vlad had followed up, by paying visits to the characters who owed their family money. Then they had placed kind reminder phone calls. Nothing was working. They had received just a few thousand dollars. It seemed as if Bensonhurst had dried up like a desert around them. The town had altered itself following Arseni’s untimely death. He had been the last local big man who had competed with the major international crime syndicates. But after his death, his competitors were more than happy for Vlad and his family to head straight down the tubes. Cash is king, and Vlad was a fallen prince headed towards pauper.

  But Vlad wasn’t done fighting and he wasn’t afraid of it either. There was always another way. Vlad decided to go ballistic. He showed his gun to Baranowski first and provided a slight preview of what he was planning.

  “I’ll go anywhere with you, partner,” Baranowski announced.

  ■

  And they did. They went to every single person on the list and did their best to inject the fear of God into them. Vlad and Baranowski would pound their victims into bloody pulp anywhere—while they were out at the park with their terrified families, leaving a local barbershop, or walking through a parking lot. They started with the easy marks—Arseni’s clients. The pawn counters, butcher shops and convenience stores that he used to provide protection for. That crowd quickly succumbed. And as soon as Vlad received the money he was owed, he made a very intelligent move. He would pivot back to the friendliest guy in the room. He’d pitch them on his gang’s services: “Now we’re going to protect you. Just like my dad did. Better, actually. I’m the new breed.”

  There were still a few holdouts. Vlad smartly didn’t mess with the real power brokers. For example, Joe Raffaeli supposedly owed Arseni forty thousand dollars. Vlad wouldn’t mess with Joe. It was unspoken. He cleared Joe’s debt as a favor, knowing it could come in handy later. But the second echelon of the criminal class was completely fair game. They were generally an unruly bunch—miscreants with drug addictions, short tempers, and careers in crime. Vlad and Baranowski had to refine their techniques when dealing with that lot. Axel taught Vlad many tricks of the trade that he’d learned in the motherland. Soon enough, Vlad was well versed in the power of the taser, the balaclava, and the printing of fake license plates for plausible deniability. Vlad increased the size of his crew, formally bringing in Roschin, Petrov, Konstantin and a few other interlopers whom he felt he could trust.

  The biggest debt of the B-squadders on Arseni’s list was a local cocaine dealer named Justin Thompson. After a gun was stuffed three inches inside Justin’s mouth, he was still swearing up and down that he had no way to get the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d borrowed from Arseni. Thompson’s story was that he’d bought product with the money, sold it for a hundred-percent markup, and then been robbed at random. All of the cash was gone, and so were the drugs. But Justin did have something Vlad might be interested in. He had a lead on a way for Vlad to make three hundred thousand dollars in one evening. Justin’s cousin was a security guard. During a late-night poker session a few weeks prior, Thompson’s cousin had informed Justin that a particular payday loan business, Cash & Loan Xpress in Brighton Beach, was emptied every two weeks. Due to the schedule, the cash load inside the store would rise significantly in the days before the armored car pickup. And the night before, there would be hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in a room in the back. The further Vlad pressed Justin, the more legit the information seemed. He had the armed guards’ routines. He had the employees’ schedules. For some reason, Cash & Loan Xpress didn’t have a proper vault. The cash room was secured with multiple locks, but those measures could be circumvented. One could burrow in, around or above it and gain access. The main issue was the alarm system. Justin’s cousin had a daytime code for use during business hours, but he didn’t possess the nighttime master.

  “So all that’s stopping you is an alarm system?” Vlad asked, a lightbulb erupting in his head.

  ■

  At the very same time, Marina and David were moving in together. Their new apartment was on the west side of Bensonhurst. Marina was studying biology at the local community college in the hopes of eventually transferring to a four-year university and then veterinary school. David was taking a semester off while he prepared to apply to Stony Brook. Neither he nor Veronika had enough money to send him to college immediately after high school. He was working back at New Utrecht as one of the school’s IT administrators. But due to Marina’s insistence, he’d started to research grant programs and had taken a campus tour. David just had to figure out where he was going to find the forty thousand dollars required to attend college for the next four years. It wasn’t growing on the few trees that split the cement wasteland of their neighborhood. But although life was tough, they had each other. They were happy. And that was extremely important, because it was only a few months later when David and Marina found out that they were pregnant.

  A few days after the positive test, David arrived at the gym. He knew he had an open invitation from Vlad to wor
k out at any time. And he had a lot on his mind. When he needed to blow off steam, the punching bag was a fantastic therapist. And it was cheap. He flew through twenty minutes on the treadmill and then started slamming the bag. Vlad approached David towards the end of his workout.

  “Hey, my peach. How you doin’?”

  “A lot’s going on,” David replied. He told Vlad about Marina’s pregnancy. He was excited but equally petrified. They only had one part-time job between the two of them, and he wanted to go to college. Vlad smiled.

  “Maybe we can help each other,” Vlad said.

  “What?”

  “You need employment, and I got a job that needs filling.”

  “What are we talking about?” David perked up.

  “I’m talking about an alarm system. Can you hack them?”

  “What’s your definition of ‘hack’? I hope you’re talking about a system that you own . . .” David inquired as he stopped the bag and focused on Vlad.

  “Mine? I don’t know . . . Not technically,” Vlad answered coyly. “When there’s a box on a pole, and you’re doing electrical work nearby, and you happen to cut through a few wires accidentally . . . Is that considered illegal?”

  “Yes. It is. I can’t get into that with you. No way, Vlad.”

  Vlad’s head wobbled slightly, as it normally did when he heard something he disagreed with. “Well, there’s always a way, my peach,” Vlad answered. “Let’s just say we’re talking hypothetically, then.”