Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  “Tyler Stanton? Are you sure? Get me Roger,” Howard commanded his underling. While waiting to be connected, he thought long and hard about all that was happening to him. He had experienced a long career full of bold, impressive action, tailwinded by powerful common interests. But nobody had taught a predator like Howard what to do when one suddenly found oneself the prey. The cartoonist had a point. Howard was the dolphin. He was the elephant. He could no longer strike back in the way he was accustomed, because the rules of the game had changed. He was sure that there were only two actions he could take.

  First, he could use the force of his own will to move the goalposts back to a comfortable position. Or second, and seemingly more appealing, drop the mic and quit the game. It was clear that Howard wasn’t a quitter. He was a winner. But he didn’t want to be the one who drove himself over the cliff with his eyes wide open. If he was going over any cliff, someone else was going to have to do all the legwork.

  ■

  Roger sat on the toilet and absorbed Page Six. Midway through a fascinating dissertation on Upper East Side daycare price inflation, he observed a small line of water running across the tile grout in his stall. Moving quite slowly, the liquid parted ways with itself at each intersection, forming a bizarre aqua crossword puzzle. Roger put down the magazine. He flushed, stood up and followed the water throughout the bathroom. The path led to a supply closet. He opened the door and looked down. The drain was completely backed up and gurgling underneath him, about an inch of water filling the bottom of the closet.

  ■

  Roger exited the bathroom at haste and proceeded directly for the service stairs. He opened the door and took the first flight of stairs down towards the second sub-basement, but water rushed up the bottom steps below. Roger could make out sparks crackling from the generators and industrial machinery in the lowest basement level, which was alarmingly now submerged in a foot of water.

  “Water,” Roger said succinctly, which sounded incredibly distinctive in his old Irish accent and similar to “Wooder.”

  ■

  Roger burst back into the vault’s control room, his face weighted by dread.

  “Call DEP and Con Ed—water and power. Get upstairs on the line. We need to shut off power and evacuate the entire building, immediately!” he exclaimed to the vault operators around him. Two of them picked up phones and gave the order to the uniformed security in the lobby.

  “What about us?” a technician asked.

  “Keep the vault’s auxiliary power on—for now. If we have to we’ll turn that off too. I don’t want to have water short the systems out,” Roger replied. “But get on the phone to the city. They need to be here!”

  “Hey, uh, Roger? Howard called,” another technician said, nervously letting Roger know that his master was looking for him.

  ■

  In Montgomery’s lobby upstairs, sirens screamed and the building lights flashed and then dimmed to signify to the rest of the complex that an honest-to-goodness emergency was taking place. A stream of businessmen and businesswomen emerged from the stairs and the elevators. Lit by only the glow of emergency lighting, security guards ushered them out the front door of the building.

  ■

  All of the lights in the kitchenette near Roger’s office were darkened. The new soda machine hummed along in the hallway before suddenly shutting down with a mechanical whirring noise. Its bright face dimmed slightly and then extinguished completely, a sign that the main power supply had been shut off in the building.

  After a few seconds, a faint noise began to emanate from the inside of the machine. Suddenly the front panel of the unit rotated open on its hinges, and David Belov tentatively stepped out from the inside of the machine, where he had been hiding for the last hour.

  David surveyed his surroundings. Due to the evacuation, the entire floor was deserted. The alarm continued to ring, and small emergency flashers at each exit sparkled. David padded down the hallway. A few steps from the kitchenette, Roger’s personal office door was open. His computer displayed a screensaver.

  David entered Roger’s office and shut the door behind him. Just to be safe, he locked it. He ducked underneath Roger’s desk. He located an ethernet cord and used crimping pliers to splice the cable. He cut himself into the network through an ethernet splitter. He pulled his small laptop from a bag and hooked it into Montgomery’s network. He began to explore the intranet while speaking into his microphone to Vlad and the rest of the crew.

  “I’m trying to find the stacking machine’s executable and the vault’s storage index. They’re somewhere in the Box, I think. I’ll have access from here under Roger’s credentials,” David said as he scanned through the various computer systems that comprised the building’s network ecosystem. First, he located the database containing the vault’s indexing information. This was essentially a record of exactly who or what organization owned which shelves inside the vault at any given point in time. But Tsunami wasn’t on the list.

  “Okay, I’m in the index. But there’s no shelves tied to Tsunami. Hold on . . .” Instead of searching by the owner’s name, David chose chronological order. He narrowed the results to the same night that he and Vlad had witnessed the gold delivery back into Montgomery’s vault. Bingo. There was only one movement initiated from a new account and logged in at two o’clock in the morning of that same day.

  “Found our gold,” David whispered excitedly. He closed the location index and browsed through Roger’s network to the server that contained the Stacker’s operating executable. “And the Stacker is mine,” David said into the little microphone attached to his shirt.

  David ran the Stacker’s program inside a virtual machine on his laptop, tricking the robot into believing it was receiving commands directly from the control room. The program provided its operator with full control of the Stacker’s physical movement. This included the ability to program directional coordinates, import automated moves, and even control the Stacker in a live condition, like a video game. David selected a few options from within the user interface of the algorithm and started to use his directional keys to control the Stacker inside the vault.

  ■

  The Stacker was essentially an automated yellow bookshelf loader on steroids. It sashayed vertically and horizontally across the facility along a series of gridded track paths that had been constructed to allow the Stacker to access virtually every square foot of the vault. Under David’s control, the robot continued to operate. First it headed deep into the back of the facility. It identified a lone, physically unmarked shelf full of gold. It picked the gold pallet up and ran ahead towards the front of the vault.

  ■

  In the control room, an operator watched the Stacker operating seemingly by itself.

  “Who told the Stacker to move?” the technician asked. No one responded. They all turned to watch the Stacker bow down and lower the pile of gold directly in front of the window, as if a peace offering to the Gods.

  “Not me, dawg,” another technician said. “Electronics must be getting funky because of the leak. I’m getting all sorts of crazy input reads over here.”

  “Con Ed better get here soon. They got no time to dodder around,” Roger said after he hung up with Howard.

  What a complete shitstorm of a day. With a dead employee and a flooded building, Roger could look forward to much more police involvement in his life. That sucked. The primary focus of Roger’s job was to make sure that situations involving the authorities cropped up as rarely as possible. Tyler Stanton’s unusual death aside, the water issue was massive but not unprecedented. The sub-basement had been flooded during Hurricane Sandy. The vault wasn’t impermeable, but it was designed to be highly water resistant, even on the occasion of a flood. During Sandy, the space had done its job and stayed high and dry. Roger hoped this time would be no different. At least in the case of the hurricane, the cause of the water had been clear. This time around, Roger couldn’t be sure, and the sheer speed of
the water level’s rise was alarming. He hadn’t yet been able to discern if the issue originated within Montgomery’s own piping infrastructure or if it was a municipal malfunction. By the volume of the water, it clearly seemed like the city’s problem. That was worse, because the city could be slow, and at the given moment Roger was watching water inch underneath the control room’s door and spill into the room itself. That meant the second sub-basement was completely flooded and the first sub-basement and all of the building’s and vault’s auxiliary power systems were next in line for shut down.

  ■

  Still crouching in Roger’s darkened office, David’s fingers dashed frantically across his computer keys. He continued to control the Stacker’s operation from his laptop, knowing that the water level was rising and soon the Stacker wouldn’t be able to move any longer. There was one final task remaining.

  ■

  After the Stacker finished moving the entire shelf of illicit gold into a pile in front of the control room, it suddenly rose until it was staring directly at Roger. Without hesitation, the Stacker jolted forward aggressively. Its lifting arms collided with pneumatic force into the Gorilla Glass of the control room window—a grudge match of offensive velocity versus defensive might. After a few hits, the Stacker caused the glass to splinter. A hairline crack appeared in the control booth’s window, and the technicians inside began to scream.

  They were trying to gain back control from the Stacker, but something was going wrong with their systems. Each time they loaded the Stacker’s executable from the server, their screens froze up or became corrupted.

  “What the hell is it doing?” Roger exclaimed incredulously.

  “Shorted,” one operator said.

  “The whole system’s dead, boss,” another technician announced with melancholy. All of the men in the control room could do nothing as they watched the Stacker line up for a fourth hit. The robot launched forward, impacting the glass. The window splintered further, speeding beyond a hairline and into an earthquake. Its tendrils grew wider and deeper inside the window like roots of a tree expanding in hyper-fast-forward. Roger became aware that his shoes were soaked. He looked down. The water in the control room had reached his ankles. He made a decision.

  “Turn off all the power—even the auxiliary,” Roger said. “We’ll evacuate—one level up.”

  The technicians started shutting down various systems. Since many of the computers were no longer responding electronically, they resorted to pulling out power cords and physically disabling the machines. Amidst this, the whole room watched as the Stacker wound up for another hit. The booth shook when the Stacker pummeled the glass again. Although the window appeared to have gone through a righteous hailstorm, the glass still stood, having not yet lost its structural integrity. The Stacker backed up once again. As the robot screamed forward for the sixth time, sparks flew from its track below. The machine suddenly stopped directly in its tracks, inches from the window—full power failure.

  ■

  Roger sprinted through the center aisle of the HVAC and power room, shutting down the twenty massive emergency-power generators that had turned on when the building’s external power had been extinguished. He reached the last generator and slammed down a lever, causing all of the remaining power in the building to disappear. It was pitch black. Roger pulled out his cell phone and used it to navigate back out of the power room. He found his technicians and they headed for the stairs, the water rushing up to their hips.

  ■

  One floor up in the basement, David tried to control the Stacker to no avail. He noticed that Roger’s computer had shut down. He leaned into the radio.

  “They shut off all the power. I’m out of the Stacker,” he whispered into the radio.

  “Did you break the window?” Vlad’s filtered voice responded.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” David finally said. “I got at least five good hits in.”

  “Proceed, my peach.”

  David nodded. He unplugged his laptop from the spliced ethernet cable and raced out of Roger’s office. He sprinted down the hallway, past the kitchenette and back towards their Trojan horse of a soda machine. David opened the dispenser’s door to reveal a full set of scuba gear hanging inside. He pulled out tanks, a BCD, and a full-face mask and began to outfit himself.

  ■

  Roger and the other guards ran up the service stairs from the sub-basement level, emerging at the level of their offices in the basement. The water was nipping at their heels. Roger raced past his office and the soda machine, but David was no longer there. Nothing was disturbed. Roger and his security staff rounded a corner and passed an elevator bank on the way towards another set of stairs. They began to climb up to the surface level.

  ■

  On the other side of the elevator door, David balanced on the inside edge of the elevator shaft. Outfitted from head to toe in scuba gear, he was about to dive into the water when he cocked his head up. He could hear something. He pulled off his mask to listen. He could clearly make out a metallic, echoing noise emanating from above him. He looked up and saw an elevator stuck midway up the shaft above him. The cab was no longer moving due to the lack of power, and the people trapped inside were banging for help. Putting it out of his mind for a moment, David looked down. There was only dark, dirty water below. He jumped in.

  David swam down the shaft and into the first sub-basement level. The door to the control room was wide open, but he couldn’t spot anyone. All at once, bright lights exploded around him. Having already arrived in the vault’s control room and also suited up themselves, Vlad, Baranowski and Konstantin shined their underwater spotlights at David. Vlad gave David the universal thumbs-up sign. Everything was on track.

  They swam into the control room and addressed the window separating them from the vault’s floor. The four of them floated in front of the splintered frame and examined its condition. The Stacker had punctured the glass but had not quite caused structural collapse. The water had finally made its way into the vault, and the Stacker was completely submerged with its circuits shorted out. Vlad put his hand to the glass and pushed. Nothing happened.

  “This is bad,” David said over the radio.

  “Truth. But we don’t let bad stop us,” Vlad replied.

  “I don’t know ’bout you, but I got two missiles on my back,” Baranowski popped up. He motioned for them to move away from the window.

  Baranowski pulled a tank off his own back, leaving one remaining. He swam towards the back of the control room. He floated the tank onto the top of a stationary counter at the rear of the room and held it down with one hand. With the other hand, he yanked his knife off an ankle holster. He repeatedly smashed the base of the knife onto the regulator atop the tank. After a number of hard blows, a series of small bubbles began to ascend from the regulator. Baranowski took a final look, confirming that the tank was aligned correctly. Then he levered his arm up and down one more time, smashing the regulator completely off. The tank exploded forward like a torpedo through the water of the control room. Aimed directly at the cracked window, the projectile made violent contact, as intended. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The splintered and damaged glass shattered immediately. David watched as thousands of shards of glass floated through the water like a slow-motion explosive shockwave.

  The vault quickly gulped up a few more feet of water and reached parity with the rest of the floor. Vlad went to work on the rest of the window, using a hammer to smash a clear path through the remaining glass remnants along the window frame. After the coast was clear, David, Vlad, Baranowski, and Konstantin swam into the vault. They floated through the cracked glass and headed towards the huge pile of gold on the floor.

  David arrived at the pile first and gripped his first gold bar in his hand. He observed it closely. Then he turned and began to help. The other three pulled along a daisy-chained trail of twenty weight-balanced, waterproof bags behind them. Konstantin guided the bags into plac
e as Vlad and Baranowski began heaving the gold bars in. Each bag was filled until it could be comfortably zipped and then handed to David. David confirmed that the bag was balanced by either adding or releasing air from a small plastic lung they’d sewn into the outside pocket of each duffel. They continued to dutifully pack the floating train of bags with gold.

  ■

  Outside of Montgomery Noyes, chaos reigned in the shadow of the civic emergency that was unfolding. Throngs of ejected office workers gawked in groups on the sidewalk across from the building. A few police officers struggled to contain the scene. One street to the side of the major commotion, the soda supply rental truck finally drove away. Its tires splashed through the water backing up out of the drains outside the building.

  Moments later the city finally arrived. Multiple utility trucks converged on the scene. DEP and Con Edison workers suited up near various manholes. One team pulled up a manhole near them. But all they found was water flush with the street level. Shit.

  The amount of policemen grew exponentially. Numerous squad cars arrived simultaneously. As the police began to establish an official cordon around the premises of the building, Jake Rivett ripped up the street in his motorcycle. He was quickly followed by Villalon in a black SUV. Jake parked his bike and hopped off. He found a pair of police officers milling about.

  “Make sure these ladies don’t leave the car,” he commanded the officer as he flashed his badge. The officer glanced into the back of Tony’s SUV and noticed that Cat and Marina were stowed there, their expressions a mix of resentment regarding their own personal situations and amazement about the state of affairs outside.

  ■

  David, Vlad, Baranowski and Konstantin swam back through the first sub-basement and into the elevator shaft. David looked up. The water had continued to rise while they were in the vault. Obviously the city hadn’t discovered their water-main stopper yet. David noticed that the elevator he’d seen above was becoming submerged. The screams from those stuck inside were growing in ferocity, but apparently no one was aware or able to help them from above. David looked down and watched Vlad, Konstantin, and Baranowski descend even deeper down the shaft, past the second sub-basement and towards the very foundation of the building. Already a certified bank robber, David wasn’t going to be party to a mass murder as well. He made a decision.