Flash Crash

by Denison Hatch

  David swam vertically, up to the elevator. He maneuvered himself against the side of the elevator until his BCD snagged on the cabling behind him and he couldn’t move farther. David wriggled out of it, making sure to attach it to the elevator. He hung his mask with the BCD and emerged from the dark water, pulling himself onto the surface of the top of the cab. He climbed atop the machine and noticed that there would only be inches of air, if that, left inside the elevator itself. He could still hear urgent banging emerging from beneath the roof. David pulled a panel off to spot a handful of screaming, terrified office workers.

  “Thank God!” they screamed, thinking that he represented an official rescue. David helped them all climb up onto the roof, one at a time, until all of them were standing atop the elevator like castaways on a small island.

  “How do we get out of here?” one asked David, starting to realize that he was a one-man band.

  “Where’s the rest of your crew?” another asked.

  “I don’t know,” David said as he shrugged, “anyone else in there?”

  The panicked inhabitants of the elevator looked around.

  “Where’s that lady? Wasn’t she in here too?” one replied.

  David took a deep breath and descended into the submerged elevator. After a brief moment, he emerged pulling an elderly woman in a heavy wool suit. She wasn’t moving. Another man on the elevator kneeled down and began to administer CPR. After a number of deep breaths, the woman slowly started to stir. She began to hack and cough up water, but she was alive.

  “What do we do now?” one of them asked.

  “That’s an excellent question,” David said. “Keep yelling. They’ll get you out eventually.”

  “What!”

  “You’re alive. Count your graces,” David said before he slipped down against the side of the elevator and disappeared back into the water.

  ■

  In the maze of pipes below Montgomery Noyes, two Con Edison workers held flashlights and walked down a massive, dry sewer line with confused looks on their faces.

  “Why’s it dry?” the Con Edison worker in a yellow safety helmet asked, noticing only a small stream of water below his feet when there should have been a few feet of fast-running water. Then the two workers turned a corner and saw the back end of Vlad’s massively inflated tunnel plug, completely obstructing the drainage tunnel.

  “Um. Holy . . . fuckin’ . . . crow,” the other emoted.

  ■

  In the back of Villalon’s police SUV, Cat and Marina perched on opposite sides of the second row with upset looks on their faces. With similar temperaments but for different reasons, they weren’t speaking to each other. Each sat in silence.

  Marina watched the commotion outside, which had turned from a civil emergency into absolute pandemonium as the police, then local newscasters, and finally the crowd began to realize that something abnormal was occurring below the surface of the city. Marina’s face suddenly scrunched up as if she’d heard something. She listened again. There it was. It wasn’t a noise—it was a rhythm. A minute and faint but identifiable vibration ran through her body. Her eyes bounced down towards her purse, which was sitting on the floor of the car by her feet. She reached into the bag and pulled out her phone. The Froggie Finder app was going crazy. “User1: Location is . . .” She noticed that the glowing dot on the app’s map was within twenty feet of her.

  “No way . . .” she murmured to her herself, piquing Cat’s interest as well.

  “What is it?” Cat asked.

  Marina didn’t reply directly. She scanned the crowd frantically through the tinted window. She couldn’t see David anywhere, even though the Froggie Finder was supposedly right nearby. She started to pound the glass of the car. “Hey! Get the detective! Get Jake!” she screamed.

  Outside, the officer standing guard heard Marina’s clanging against the window. He leaned towards the glass and screamed back, “Shut up, lady! I don’t have time for your bullshit!”

  ■

  Vlad, Baranowski, and Konstantin swam through the completely submerged foundation level of the building. They followed a small pipe along the floor towards an intersection with a much larger drain main, where a human-sized hole had been torched. Baranowski swam through the hole. Konstantin followed. About to enter, Vlad turned and noticed with alarm that David wasn’t there. He hesitated. The heist wouldn’t be complete unless David was with him. But luckily David swam frantically around the corner towards Vlad a few seconds later, giving the thumbs-up sign as he did. Vlad grinned.

  ■

  In a regional water center on the outskirts of the city, a supervisor in a hard hat sprinted down a metal walkway. He finally reached a row of wheels and their connected pressure valves. After consulting a schematic on the tablet in his hands, the supervisor located the valve he was looking for. He began to spin the wheel clockwise, finally closing it. Then he stepped left and did the same with another. He continued to work on the valves, slowly decreasing and finally stopping the water supply into a ten-square-block area of Manhattan, of which Montgomery Noyes stood at the epicenter.

  ■

  In the stairwell above the sub-basement levels, Roger O’Neill watched the water begin to slowly subside.

  “Call me off my nut, but I’m going back in,” Roger yelled.

  “Roger, are you crazy?” his assistant asked. “You could get stuck down there.”

  “The water’s going down. I’m not insane—I’m an O’Neill.”

  Roger ripped off his jacket and tie. He pulled his shoes off. And without any hesitation, he dove into the water while the assembled security and staff around him gawked. No matter what you thought about Roger, he put his money where his mouth was. He was impressive—the true definition of a man.

  ■

  Perhaps unlike Howard Bergensen, who finally arrived in his limousine after slowly navigating the police cordon outside the building. He stomped up through the front stairs, pushing aside cops and security alike.

  “Where the hell is Roger?” Howard asked as he flew down the steps into the basement level where the vault staff was standing. Long faces greeted him.

  “Uh, he went swimming, Mr. Bergensen,” one finally replied.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “The flood, sir . . .”

  Howard stepped past them to gaze down the stairwell below. The water had receded another foot, but when he finally saw it in person, a look of pure horror flashed across his face.

  “The vault,” he muttered.

  “What was that?” the vault technician asked.

  “The vault. They went for the vault.”

  “Huh? Who went for the vault?” the crowd around Howard asked, not sure if they should be more concerned about the nonsensical words coming out of his mouth than they already were.

  ■

  After swimming down one floor, Roger dipped underneath a low ceiling. Looking for air, his fingers clawed against a ceiling tile with its integrated vent. He ripped the metal panel off and ascended a few feet into the vent, where he found the air pocket he had been expecting. He breathed deep, gasping breaths. He pulled himself down again, and stroked back into the first sub-basement. It was pitch black, but he knew this corridor like the back of his hand. He swam toward the open door to the vault’s control room at the end of the hallway.

  ■

  Two blocks from Montgomery’s front doors, but still within the police cordon, David and Vlad stepped out from the back of the blue van. They were dripping wet, but so were a number of the groups standing outside the building. They fit right in.

  After David and Vlad had departed, Baranowski and Konstantin also pulled themselves out of the manhole below the van and rose through the hole in the floor of the closed vehicle. They slowly rotated the steel floor panel down, covering up the hole. They worked their way into the front seat, started the ignition, and drove the van away from Montgomery’s headquarters.

  ■

  By the
time Roger finally made his way into the control room, the water had receded and a void of oxygen had appeared two inches from the ceiling. Roger rotated his feet up in front of him and floated to the top of the space in order to breathe. He inhaled the air carefully, afraid the water would swell into his open mouth. But it didn’t.

  Roger somersaulted down to gaze at the vault ahead. The last time he’d been in the control room, the window was simply cracked. Now the glass was completely broken. He swam back towards the ceiling for more air. The water’s recession had reached a crescendo. It spilled from the room and slowly revealed the rest of the space. As Roger took another breath, his toes finally felt the surface of the floor below. It was only then that Roger noticed a scuba tank lying on the floor in the middle of the vault.

  ■

  Baranowski drove the blue van down the street, with Konstantin in the passenger seat. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been parked enough streets away to avoid the police roadblock. In front of them were three angled and parked police cruisers and a few menacing cops holding automatic rifles and shotguns.

  Jake stood with the officers, inspecting each car as it attempted to exit. Drying his hair off with a towel, Baranowski rolled down his window.

  “Hey, officer. What’s going on here?” Baranowski asked calmly, emitting a big ol’ warm smile.

  ■

  The water inside the vault at hip level, Roger stood easily. He gazed at the vault and was finally able to take a good, long look at the situation. The window was smashed and the stack of gold that the Stacker had mistakenly placed in front of the window was gone. Roger fell to his knees just as Howard Bergensen waded into the control room behind him. Howard’s eyes blew wide when he resolved the destruction.

  “What happened?” Howard asked Roger.

  “I don’t think this was just a flood,” Roger replied. “We were robbed. We were fucking robbed, Howard. So what’s our procedure? What do we do?” Roger asked.

  “I dunno,” Howard replied. “What does a dead man do? As for me . . . I’m going to order myself a truffle pizza. Then I’m going to savor it while I write my goddamn resignation letter to the board.”

  ■

  The police officer in front of the roadblock gazed suspiciously at Baranowski.

  “Why are you’s all wet?”

  “We were doing work next door—painting that kitchenette right there in the basement. It filled up with water in about ten seconds. What the heck happened, officer?” Baranowski replied.

  “I need you to open the back,” the officer commanded him.

  “It’s a bunch of paint. We’re just driving through, sir,” Baranowski said.

  Without pause, the officer pulled his gun and aimed it at Baranowski. “Open—the—back.” This was serious business, staring into the oblivion of a gun barrel.

  “You got it. No problem at all. I’ll just get out and walk, okay?” Baranowski slowly exited the driver’s seat. He walked around the side of the van. His normally confident fingers nervously gripped the handle to the back of the van, preparing for what was about to come. Baranowski swung open the back door of the van. There was nothing—no gold—only paint supplies as promised.

  “They’re good,” Jake said as he nodded at the officer, who allowed Baranowski through.

  ■

  David and Vlad joined a large pack of the office building’s workers, queuing through a security line set up by the cops. They approached and were quickly frisked by a couple of busy policemen who didn’t give them much of a second look. One of them patted David’s pockets. Feeling something bulky, he asked, “What’s that?”

  “My cell phone,” David replied. The policeman nodded his head, and they walked through to freedom.

  David and Vlad half-jogged down the street and into a nearby parking garage. They quickly located Vlad’s Mercedes and burned rubber out of there.

  ■

  Still inside the cordon, Marina watched her Froggie Finder application miserably as the tracking dot quickly moved away from their location. The transponder blinked south through Manhattan and headed towards the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. She kept knocking incessantly on the window of the car, but the officer outside had stopped responding after her first few volleys. Desperation flashed across Marina’s face. She grabbed the front seat’s neck brace with one hand and her seat with the other. She faced the window.

  “What are you doing, honey?” Cat asked.

  In the current moment, Marina actually didn’t feel the need to ever express a single word to her former best friend forever. She used her upper body to propel both feet into the window. She only cracked the glass. She went for it again, this time completely breaking through with her feet. She pulled herself back into the car, reached out and opened the door from the outside.

  Marina dove out of the SUV and onto the street. The officers had already noticed. They pounced, but Marina didn’t care. She wanted to get Jake’s attention, and she knew the best way to do that was to let out a bloodcurdling scream of epic proportions. As the officers attempted to wrangle her down, Marina fought like a banshee and yelled like one, too, “Jake! Detective! I know where they are!”

  Turning his head from about fifty yards out, Jake Rivett finally took notice of the ferocious Belov woman.

  THIRTY-TWO

  DAVID AND VLAD REACHED the other side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and found themselves in Staten Island. Vlad navigated the Mercedes into a back alleyway of an industrial zone off Richmond Terrace. There was a garage ahead. Inside was another rental box truck. Vlad and David stowed the Mercedes and jumped into the truck.

  ■

  A mile southeast of Port Richmond, water pumped ferociously into the Silver Lake Reservoir. The rented white truck drove up, and Vlad and David emerged. The coast was clear. They approached the drain output pipe they’d visited the previous day. They removed the last of the already loosened bolts and rotated the cover aside. Water rushed over a large dark clump at the bottom of the drain. Vlad reached into the mass and pulled out an underwater bag. He unzipped the bag. It was filled with gold bars. And there were nineteen more bags to pull out.

  Vlad laughed like the bastard he was. David was quiet. He’d pressed the Froggie’s button earlier, but salvation had not shown its face. Maybe he just wasn’t smart enough for this. He was beginning to wonder if there was anything at all he could do to pull himself out of the sinkhole. It didn’t seem likely. That’s the nature of the cascade. Once inertia’s forces pick a direction, it only takes a push of the finger, or a smack of the enter key, to send one over the event horizon with no hope of traversing the other direction. David had learned this all too well. Now he was wondering if in his haste, he’d gone and ruined himself completely.

  He stared at the gold. He didn’t want any of it. His body quaked with fear when he thought about what he’d just done. He should have listened to Marina. He was positive that he’d learned his lesson. He just wished it had sunk in earlier. And while David was contemplating all of this, Vlad wasn’t. Vlad was talking. Because Vlad hated silence and it made him antsy.

  “We are complete legends now, David. Whole street’s going to know our name,” Vlad said.

  “Which street?” David asked through his grimace. Victory was bitter, and the tragedy was becoming unbearable. The two of them continued to pull bags out of the drainage output and load them into the truck.

  “They never knew what hit ’em, and they’ll definitely never know who!” Vlad ranted.

  As he listened to Vlad drone on, David couldn’t help but think about the original truth teller in his family—his mother Veronika. She had warned him. She wasn’t explicit. She wasn’t a mind reader. But she was prescient. He replayed the lesson in his mind. David still remembered their conversation from years before as if it were happening in real time, because it had been the last night that Veronika would ever say a word about David’s father.

  THIRTY-THREE

 

  THE
MORNING OF THE Cash & Loan job, David still hadn’t decided to participate. It would be swift, easy, and it would pay Vlad back for protecting his hide. But that didn’t make it the right thing to do. The paradoxes ran deep, and registering one’s manhood in the game of life was extremely complicated.

  It was a Friday morning. David was sitting in his mother’s kitchen and worrying. Beyond the immediate decision ahead, he had college to consider. Stony Brook’s colorful pamphlet was sitting on the counter in front of him, projecting a perfectly sanitized and successful version of the world. He could almost taste the university experience, like the sensation of sodium on one’s tongue a few blocks from the beach. But Stony Brook was still quite far off, with walls of the necessary cash piled up as obstacles between.

  Veronika prepared pancakes for him by the stove. She’d even located a cup of blueberries to mix in, which he liked, although he preferred chocolate. Veronika had requested David visit her that morning, and yet she wasn’t saying much. Both of those facts were unusual. She was tense. David wondered if she’d heard something, somehow, about Vlad’s plans. He didn’t want her to be worried about him. All that was required was two snips of a wire. Then he’d be free from Vlad’s clutches and even score a little cash to go along with it—not that he could tell her any of that.

  Veronika loaded up his plate and brought it over to him with a glass of orange juice. She sat down at the table, which David found awkward. Generally she would spend the majority of her weekend sitting in the back den, watching stories on the television and smoking cigarettes.