The Downside

by Mike Cooper

  A well-kept worksite encouraged conscientious work.

  “Finn.” Nicola called him over.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m finding … something. In the traffic over there.” She spoke quietly, not obviously keeping secrets from Asher but not shouting, either.

  “The rail traffic?” He didn’t know what she meant.

  “No. Comms traffic. The dispatchers have an internal messaging system. It’s hard to follow, because I don’t understand most of the abbreviations. I think they’re talking on the radio and the phones, too, and I can’t hear that, so I only get pieces of the conversations.” She shook her head. “Anyway.”

  “So what are you seeing?”

  “I’m not sure. Some kind of special project or something. One guy started complaining about how it’s completely screwing up his schedule. Someone else is going on about how the yards as far away as Pittsburgh will be affected. Bunch of other comments like that in between what looks like more routine business.”

  “Okay,” Finn said. “But that’s not unusual, is it? Run a big complicated railroad, thousands of cars and hundreds of trains, stuff probably comes up all the time.”

  “Maybe, though this seems out of the ordinary.” She shrugged. “Not that I have any idea. But the reason we might want to pay attention is the date.”

  Finn sighed. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Yes.” She pointed at the screen. “December thirty-first, middle of the night.”

  Of course.

  “Well,” said Finn. “It’s going to be busy night, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Walking through the park gate, Finn paused to let a young mother on her way out pass through. She was pushing a Euro-styled baby carriage, the kind with three wheels on a shaped titanium frame and a vibrant green-and-blue nylon dome.

  “—cold as shit,” the woman was saying into her cell phone. “‘Get the baby fresh air,’ they’re always telling me, but this isn’t a park, it’s a fucking prison yard.”

  Okay, a babysitter then. He nodded as she passed, was ignored in return, and continued in.

  Needless to say, it sure didn’t feel like a prison yard to Finn. Too much concrete and brick, yes, with scant patches of dirt behind asphalt curbs. Barren, the few trees leafless and stark against the dull gray of encroaching apartment blocks. And the benches he could see were missing slats—even though the wooden planks were probably two-by-threes, held in place with heavy lag bolts. Someone had gone to serious trouble to tear them out.

  But there were some colorful plastic toys in the sand area, and the jungle gym was a complicated playground of twisty poles, climbing bars, and dark blue platforms. Three teenagers were shooting baskets in the far court, fast and aggressive and laughing. One of them appeared to be a girl.

  Finn wore plain black leggings and a sweatshirt, hood pulled up. He started with jumps: burpees, lunges left and right, squats. Starting to warm up, he did four sets of planks, then handstand push-ups.

  In the pen, nothing else to do, he’d gotten strong and balanced enough not to need a wall. But since getting out, he’d been busy. He tucked into the handstand in front of the jungle gym—no children were using it—and braced against its tower.

  Down slow, faster up. Again … again …

  At nineteen reps, arms starting to tremble, a voice interrupted.

  “When does the blood come out your nose?”

  Halfway into the next one, Finn instead dropped his legs, thrust off the ground, and half turned in the air to land on his feet.

  “Emily.” He grinned. “Why, does that happen to you?”

  “Only after the first hundred, hundred fifty.”

  She wore a teal puffy jacket over gray pants and boots that looked more stylish than practical. Business casual, perhaps. Midafternoon and she’d said she was coming from a meeting.

  “You mind if I keep moving?” Finn said. “I’ll freeze if I start to cool down.”

  “You watched me climb, I guess I can watch you do some jumping jacks.”

  They walked to the chain-link fence behind the basketball courts. Finn put his back to it, reaching as high as he could behind his head, and grasped the wire. Shifting until comfortable, he raised his legs straight out, then up to almost touch his nose, then back down and held them there. Five seconds, six …

  Emily nodded. “Don’t feel you have to show off or anything.”

  “Of course not.” He lowered his legs, heels just brushing the ground, and started a set of twenty lifts. “So what’s up?”

  “Wes is starting to fray. The calls come in all day. I see him in his office behind the glass walls, waving his arms and walking around with the headset on. The auditor’s here—usually we don’t get her team in until March. Everybody looks grim.”

  “You said cash flow was getting tight.”

  “It’s worse now.”

  He caught her tone and finished up, dropping from the fence. “What’s going on?”

  “He’s planning to fuck you over, Finn.”

  One of the teenagers missed a pass and the basketball slammed into the chain link just behind him. Startled, they both spun around. The boy gestured with one hand—Sorry, bro—retrieved the ball and went back to their two-on-one.

  Finn worked his hands, sore from the wire. “I’m not surprised. We talked about that.”

  “If—when—you get into the vault, he’s going to dial 911.”

  “What? While we’re inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Finn frowned, feeling anger stir. “The whole idea here is to not get found out. He wants his counterfeits disappeared—not exposed for the whole world to see.”

  Emily glanced at the ballplayers fifteen feet away. “Come on.”

  They walked back toward the jungle gym. Wind gusted between the buildings, raising a chill on Finn’s neck.

  “How do you know this?”

  “He needs my help.” Emily shoved her hands into her coat pockets. “One of my jobs—now and then, Wes has to run some trades off the books. Anything through the company systems has a full audit trail. If Wes is doing something sideways, he might need some layers of deniability on the transactions.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Mostly. Depends on exactly who’s getting cheated.”

  “And in this case?”

  “He’s setting you up.”

  Finn had undirected energy coursing through his system. He looked at the jungle gym, found a bar seven feet off the ground, reached up and started doing pull-ups.

  “I don’t understand,” he said between breaths.

  “He explained just enough so I’d know what to do. It has to be timed exactly right. Wes wants the guards to catch you in the act, right after you’ve switched the fakes into the neighbor’s rack.”

  “Why?” Finn stopped at twenty-five and dropped off the bar. “We went over all this. When news breaks, that will just drive the price into the basement. He’ll lose everything.”

  “He’ll lose the rhodium, yes, but—”

  “But?”

  Emily glanced at him, then hopped up to take Finn’s place on the bar. Much faster, she knocked off twenty-five pull-ups—then one extra, ostentatiously.

  “He wants me buying deep out-of-the-money puts,” she said, back on the ground. “In secret, small lots, not raising any flags.”

  Finn looked from her to the bar, back. “What does that mean?”

  “Going short. Remember? They make money when the price goes down, not up.”

  “How much? Enough to cover what he loses on the inventory?”

  “More than.”

  Finn tried to make sense of it.

  “So you’re saying he’s, like, fuck my rhodium, it’s all shit, but I can screw everyone e
lse?”

  “Exactly. He wants the price driven down.”

  “How much is he going to make?”

  “Based on the numbers he’s giving me, if rhodium falls to two-thirds of its starting price, Wes immediately takes home twenty-seven million dollars.” Emily paused. “Down to half, and it’s more like fifty.”

  “Holy batshit.” But one conclusion seemed obvious. “This is exactly what he did in New Mexico, isn’t it? With the molybdenum?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “Too much coincidence—the exact same strategy.”

  “No.” Emily shook her head. “It’s not some big secret. People try to move the market all the time.”

  “Move it down?”

  “Sure.”

  “Fucking Wall Street.” Finn started walking, not going anywhere in particular. “Think you could find out for sure?”

  “New Mexico—you want proof? Maybe in the old files. I don’t know.”

  “It would help.”

  They stopped at the edge of the park. Finn leaned into the fence, stretching his legs. After a moment, he stopped, frowned, and straightened up.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wes is actually buying these, uh, puts?”

  “Yes.”

  “With what? He didn’t even have a few thousand bucks for us. Where’s he getting the money for this big play?”

  Emily kept pace. “Why do you think there’s nothing for you?”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “He’s been cleaning out accounts for weeks, setting this up. Sweeping pennies off the floor practically.” She put a hand on Finn’s arm, slowed him to a stop. “This has to be the biggest gamble of Wes’s career. He’s walking up to the blackjack table and putting everything on a single hand.”

  “That’s too fucking stupid for words.”

  “Not if the wheel is rigged,” Emily said. “And by the way? You’re the ones rigging it for him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  David’s day had been a long one. He’d spent the morning with a trio of company lawyers, sorting out December’s termination proceedings—serious rule breaking always involved the security staff sooner or later. The afternoon was more meetings: a major shipper dissatisfied that some gang had looted his containers of flatscreens and video games, an HR manager looking for help with a harassment complaint, three performance reviews—he had to finish his entire staff before the end of the year, and time was running out.

  To David’s way of thinking, that meant he’d wasted eleven hours in completely nonproductive activity. But he was tired and hungry, and it was time to go home.

  In the locker room, he ran into one of the operations managers changing out of stained, greasy overalls. For a senior manager, he was often as dirty and blackened as his crew.

  “You’re here late,” David said.

  “Repacking the bearing boxes for the special flatbed.” The man rolled up his overalls and stuffed them into a plastic bag. “We’re way over spec tolerances, so everything needs to be triple-checked.”

  “Problem?”

  “Well … just the weight, really. Forgot about the load distribution.”

  David removed his uniform jacket and shirt—the latter into a laundry bag, the former into his locker. He didn’t like going off the property looking like a rent-a-cop. “Load distribution?”

  “Yeah. You ever seen one of these bucket-wheel excavators?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a monster. They have to take it apart for shipping—one set of treads on one flatcar, primary gearbox on another, all down the train. But the excavator arm is a single unit.”

  “That’s the hundred-foot-long thing.”

  “Thirty-seven meters, actually. It fits on the articulated car they built. It’s shorter than those aircraft fuselages we get sometimes.”

  “So what’s the issue?”

  “The weight. The bucket wheel is massive—this enormous toothed claw of solid steel. The pictures look like something out of a video game.”

  “Huh?”

  “Robot warriors as tall as skyscrapers, you know the kind of thing.” The man tightened the belt on his cleaner pants. “Don’t you?”

  “I’ll ask my grandsons.”

  “Anyway, because the arm is so long, and the claw is at the very end, it has to sit entirely over a single truck on the railcar. Which means we’ve got three hundred tons sitting on the wheelsets.”

  “Too much?”

  “Not for the railcar, no. They’re driving it slow. But all that weight bearing down on one short piece of track—we had to go back and check the limits on every single crossing between Pittsburgh and here.”

  “The bridges have to be built for way more than that. Some of those old steam locomotives weighed four hundred tons, and they were in service seventy years ago.”

  “Okay, the bridges should be fine. But all the culverts? Grade crossings with utility conduits? Run a steamroller that damn heavy down the line, things might break.”

  “Huh.” David finished changing his clothes and snapped his locker closed. “Glad that’s not my problem.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  They walked out of the building. The night air was cold, wispy clouds beginning to blur the moon’s bright circle.

  “Smells like snow,” David said.

  “That’d be just the thing, wouldn’t it? Get a blizzard for the holidays.”

  “The kids would love it.”

  At his car, David stopped for a moment before getting in.

  “The weight,” he said. “It’s solved, right? The train comes in, you’ll transfer it out with no trouble?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Without a lot of extra delay?”

  “Yep.” The man shrugged. “Unless something goes wrong.”

  Finn thought that Nicola’s hotel looked familiar—enough that several blocks away, he pulled his truck over and sat a minute, trying to figure out why.

  The building was blocky and surfaced with flat, dun-colored stone, the windows blank and square. Dirt-cheap construction: code-minimum metal framing, synthetic chipboard, plastic and aluminum fittings, a skin of faux limestone. Any decorative feature would cost money, so there were none. It was night, and small spots illuminated the sign, the entrance, and the building’s top corners.

  Oh.

  It looked a lot like the Albuquerque state courthouse.

  Finn sighed and put the truck back in gear. His trial had lasted a week. The van from the county lockup took him directly into the underground garage, but he’d caught glimpses on the way in and out every day.

  Both New Mexico taxpayers and huge-hotel-chain executives were apparently willing to settle for gimcrack construction, the cheaper the better.

  In the parking lot, he drove to the rear and called Nicola’s number.

  “Be right down,” she said. “North side entrance.”

  “North?” Finn looked around. “I forgot my compass.”

  “To the right of the main entrance as you walk in.”

  He parked the truck and waited until he saw Nicola appear through the glass door, coming from an adjacent stairwell. They arrived at the door at the same time, and she pushed the panic bar to let him in.

  “Cheap, this place,” Finn said.

  “Doing my part.”

  “Every penny counts.”

  “Top floor.” As they ascended five flights of stairs, she gave him a pair of latex gloves, putting on her own in the hallway.

  Her room was at the end of the hall, the same plain materials as the building’s exterior. Finn dropped into the single chair, a little out of breath.

  “I told them I couldn’t sleep with morning sun coming in,” she said. “And I had to be on an upper floor because of noise.”


  “Did it work?”

  “Take a look.” She swept open the window shade. Finn rose and stood next to her, peering into the night.

  The hotel stood right off I-78, at the far end of the mile-long rail yard. The classification tracks were visible, fading into darker distance, patches of stadium lighting dull on the containers and freight cars. The yard’s perimeter fence stretched away from them, Caleb Street alongside it, warehouses and industry pressing in from the other side.

  “I can’t see our building,” Finn said, squinting.

  “It’s down there. With this”—Nicola tapped a spotting scope mounted on a tripod—“I’ve got a nice view of the main lot and the operations center.”

  “You’re right.” He could see the dispatch tower in the distance, windows glowing.

  “Though it doesn’t matter too much. Mostly I’ll be using the various video feeds.”

  She’d set up three computers on the desk—two laptops and a monitor connected to a smaller box—amid a tangle of cables, a keyboard, and a separate numeric pad.

  Finn traced two of the network lines to ports set in the hotel’s desk.

  “You’re using the hotel’s internet? Is that safe?”

  “There’s an encrypted VPN tunneled to a remote server I set up as a secure node for this project. All my traffic goes through it, then out into the world. For the sensitive connections, I’m using a series of anonymous proxies. On the night, I’ll switch them again, to onetime dark nodes.”

  “Right. Sounds great.”

  Nicola laughed. “Look, I’m the one sitting here, right? If I slip up and the opposition gets a traceroute, they’re going to break down my door, not yours. Trust me, it’s secure.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  After Emily’s revelations about Wes’s plan, Finn had thought hard about what to tell the rest of the team. In the end, he decided that saying nothing was the best approach. Emily told Wes the job was scheduled for Saturday night, January fourth, and Finn had confirmed that in a separate conversation. Wes could go ahead and plan whatever he wanted—Finn and his crew would get it done days before then.