Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  “How’s Plank Industrials doing?” I asked.

  “Down, down, down. It’s a feeding frenzy. And not just the stock—guys are starting to short the bonds.”

  “Really?” Short selling bonds was a notably riskier way to bet on a company’s downfall, mostly because the market for them was much less liquid. The best position in the world is worthless if you can’t buy or sell out of it. “So everyone’s totally convinced that Terry Plank is going to die.”

  “Not necessarily. If he has to spend the next few months in hiding, it’s almost the same thing—his business still suffers.”

  I thought about that. “Still seems ghoulish.”

  “It’s just a trade.” Hairsplitting ethical philosophy was not Johnny’s forte. “Where are you?”

  “Chalder. The salt flats of American culture.”

  “Jersey.” His dismissive shrug was clear in that single word. “What’s happening there?”

  “Waiting for the killer to show up.” I explained Blacktail’s connection to at least three of the deaths so far.

  “Blacktail Capital? The flash traders? They’re huge. You’re saying they’re involved?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  “And you didn’t tell me this?” Johnny sounded upset.

  “Well…”

  Gunned motors sounded in the parking lot. I caught a glimpse of a black truck roaring up the aisle toward us.

  “Holy sh—”

  Brakes slammed and wheels screeched. A second vehicle—an SUV—bounced over the grass strip behind us and scraped along Zeke’s side, jolting our car and banging it forward a few inches. The truck slewed around in front, stopping at an angle across our left front.

  I’d started the engine in an instant, but we were boxed. Zeke couldn’t even open his door.

  “Silas?” Johnny’s voice in my ear. “What’s going on?”

  I ignored him.

  One man leaped from the truck. Gray body armor, flat cap, combat boots—and a SCAR assault rifle. Black-tinted windows concealed however many others remained in the vehicles.

  Zeke drew his handgun and fired without hesitation. Four shots in an instant, right across the windshield. The safety glass fractured into a million spiderweb cracks but held together. He shoved forward, out of his seat, going right through and rolling across the hood. The shattered sheet of glass fell aside.

  The attacker was on my left, swinging his weapon up. I opened my door fast, levering off the floor, and slammed him in the torso. The rifle stuttered. Unaimed bullets cracked into the car’s metal and fiberglass.

  Zeke was gone. I heard a couple of shots.

  “Drop your fucking guns!” The truck had a bullhorn.

  I didn’t even have mine out. I jammed the transmission into reverse and bucked backward, but the Fusion’s bumper scraped and jammed on the curb. Okay—forward, then. I struck the truck, budging it left a foot or two.

  Another guy jumped out, leaving his door hanging. He had a handgun in each hand, like some idiot Hollywood hero.

  Good news, because it’s near impossible to aim either one that way.

  On the other hand, his range was about six feet. Both pistols came up, pointed at me. I hunched, involuntarily.

  A shot, and the man jerked, then fell.

  Thanks, Zeke.

  I rammed the car backward, then forward again. More gunfire. The Fusion’s side windows blew out in a spray of glass. I kept going. Neither vehicle could be pushed out of the way, but daylight opened up between them. Side panels screeched and tore as I scraped through.

  “Stop! Stop!” More yelling through the bullhorn.

  As I cleared the truck, I looked right and saw Zeke coming out of the SUV.

  Out? He must have gone in the opposite door, shot his way through, and kept right on going.

  One hostile vehicle out of action.

  The truck suddenly moved, leaping forward and sideswiping the row of parked vehicles in front of us. I spun my wheel right, gaining room but destroying the front of a Prius.

  Zeke yanked open the rear passenger door and dived into the backseat.

  “Go!” he yelled.

  “I know, I know!” I put the accelerator on the floor, and the Fusion shot ahead.

  “Fucking bumper cars!” Zeke laughed.

  “Silas?” Amazingly, Johnny was still on the line.

  We rocketed down the long row of parked vehicles. The truck pulled close, then struck the Fusion’s rear corner, throwing it into the beginning of a spin, but we ricocheted off a minivan and I wrenched the wheel back into line.

  “They’re wearing armor.” Wind through the absent windshield blew bits of glass into my chest and made my eyes tear.

  “Go around the corner.” Zeke reloaded, leaned around and fired twice at our pursuers.

  “Right.” So far none of the collisions had been at speed, so sensors had not blown the airbags in our car or their truck. But if we arranged for them to plow into us, that might change. “Hold on.”

  I sped up as the end of the parking lot approached, letting them think we were heading for the exit. At the last car in the row, I pulled the wheel sharp right, then immediately back left. The car swayed, its centripetal acceleration amplified by the one-two, and slid into a smoking left turn. I hit the gas, hard, and the rear tires whined, still in their skid. We cleared the corner just as the rubber finally caught traction, coming out of the turn and accelerating into the alleyway behind the building.

  “Yawww, motherfucker!”

  Zeke’s battle zone war whoops could be downright embarrassing.

  The service way was barely one truck wide, the loading dock on one side and the utility shack on the other. I hit the brake pedal with both feet, throwing the car’s nose almost to the ground, and we screamed to a halt sixty feet in.

  “Brace!” I shouted and threw my arms in front of my face.

  The truck took a few extra seconds coming around the corner. The driver must have been good, because they appeared going almost as fast as we’d been.

  Really good. In one second he saw us, realized I’d set up the collision—and decided to avoid it.

  He feathered his steering, just enough to pass us. The truck had to be going forty, fifty miles an hour. It flashed by, a blur of black metal. I could see it start to turn in again, the driver calculating he had barely enough room to slide in between us and the utility shed.

  He almost made it.

  A stepdown transformer was bolted onto the shed’s exterior wall, several fat power cables routed overhead. The truck was inches clear of the wall but struck the big metal box, breaking it free of its mount and dragging the cables.

  The driver slowed, too late. His truck caromed off the wall, bouncing up on two wheels, completely out of control. Cables snapped, and masonry cascaded down where the junction box was torn free.

  “Uh-oh,” said Zeke.

  The utility shed exploded.

  One instant—I saw huge sparks, and flame and blast debris blowing out from the epicenter.

  Then something struck the front of the car, and the airbags detonated. I was punched in the face hard enough to lose consciousness for a moment.

  When I swam back a few seconds later, the bags had deflated. With no windshield, I had a nice clear view of the destruction still raining down in front of us. The utility building had half collapsed, metal and wood sticking into the air, while flames leaped from the transformer. The truck was crumpled against the loading dock, where it had finally come to rest, one door sprung open. Even as I struggled to get moving, a man lurched out of the cab and stumbled several steps.

  Zeke grabbed my shoulder.

  “Come on! Gonna blow!”

  We ditched, scrambling out and running back the way we’d come. At the building’s corner I glanced back. A fireball exploded from the wreckage, engulfing the Fusion and ticking our way.

  The truck was on the other side. I could see it dimly through the white heat. Whether its occupants had escape
d was, at least for the moment, irrelevant—there was no way for them to reach us through the inferno.

  A hundred yards away we stopped. People were already coming out the front door, some running. Every single person we saw had a cellphone pressed up against their ear, shouting.

  “Shit,” said Zeke.

  “That was too fucking CGI.” I brushed grit from my face. “What the fuck were they storing in that shed, Tovex?”

  “The transformers. Loaded with insulating oil, flammable as all hell.”

  “I guess so.” I watched thick black smoke pour from behind the building. The first siren was just audible.

  “Those guys—Saxon?”

  “No. Not the two I saw. I think I recognized one from the attack on Clara, but not for sure.”

  “Might be time to go.”

  I took a moment to look him over, while he did the same for me—shock could make you unconscious of all sorts of injuries. We both seemed to have nothing worse than some scratches and grime.

  “The car’s fucked,” I said.

  “Good.” The more damage, the slower CSI would get anything useful out of it.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think there’s a subway nearby.” I pulled out my phone, and realized that I still had the earpiece in place. “Johnny? Are you still there?” The display indicated the call was still clocking, but I didn’t hear anything. I hit the red button and dialed a new number.

  “Calling a taxi?”

  “No, we’re going to have to walk.” I gestured, and we set off, trying to look normal, strolling through an increasing flow of gawkers headed inward. “I thought maybe I ought to report the Fusion stolen.”

  “That’s courteous.”

  “For Hayden’s sake—to keep him out of it a few extra hours.”

  “Why bother? You said he was dirty.”

  A second explosion boomed behind us. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but we’re kind of implicated right now. Let’s at least make a getaway before we go back to fucking with Hayden’s life.”

  Zeke nodded. “Think the false ID will hold up?”

  “Not unless we’re luckier than we deserve. But they might not be able to make a connection to me. Or you, for that matter.”

  “Hope not.”

  “What I can’t figure is, how did they notice us?”

  “Sitting in the car all afternoon? Any dummy could have seen us from their window.”

  “Maybe.”

  We watched a police car make its dramatic entrance, lights and siren and horn all going. It was green and tan—must have been Chalder local cops. The first fire engine followed close behind, and then the rush started: staties, ambulances, unmarked Interceptors. Overhead, helicopters began to appear, rerouted from their watch over the afternoon commute.

  “You know,” said Zeke, “there’re times I’m happy to work for you for free.”

  “That’s convenient,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Awesome.” Johnny leaned back in the cracked vinyl booth. “That is a literal description. I stand in awe of what you did.”

  “You’re sitting.”

  “I was standing when I heard, though. Four hundred seventy points off the Dow. Fucking amazing.”

  Seven p.m. in Dan’s All-American, a little place down in Soho. Zeke had let me stay at his place for a few hours, to clean up, watch the news, make some calls. I even napped for an hour. But Zeke really doesn’t have electricity, so at six it got dark.

  Zeke might have been fine with an oil lamp, but not me. He fell asleep before seven, and I arranged to meet Johnny. I’d drained one cellphone talking to Clara earlier, and at Zeke’s I couldn’t recharge the batteries. Obviously. Here in the diner I had it plugged in to one of the outlets Dan provides for laptop users.

  “At least this time there’s a clear explanation for the crash,” I said. “So the market should come right back up again.”

  “It hadn’t as of close. Volatility’s through the roof overseas, too. I think this one’s going to reverberate for a while.”

  Johnny was practically rubbing his hands, like some gleeful Victorian. Traders love a high volatility index more than anything. So long as the market’s moving, up or down doesn’t matter.

  It’s Flatland where the experienced guys go broke.

  “It wasn’t just the sudden outage,” he continued. “Blacktail was running some sort of microarbitrage on a slew of old-economy dinosaurs. When you knocked them offline, they had something like six thousand open positions—that one instant!”

  A lot. More than enough. Several of Blacktail’s major orders were for stocks in the actual Dow industrials index—which is only thirty companies, not the entire exchange. As they plummeted, panic set in, first as other traders’ automatic sell orders were triggered, then as humans started making split-second decisions to get out. Everything spiraled out of control even faster than last time, despite the array of system tweaks the regulators had put in place.

  When a bubble bursts, no safeguards in the world can keep it inflated. No one should even try.

  I watched Johnny bulldoze through his snack: pan-fried steak, sweet-potato fries and red gravy.

  “You heard it start,” I realized.

  “Mm-hmm.” His mouth was stuffed.

  “On the phone. And I’d just told you I was outside Blacktail’s offices.” I started to laugh. “Damn, Johnny, you were in, weren’t you?”

  “Twenty seconds.” He swallowed, drank some Nehi out of the bottle. “I heard the blast, and you yelling, and I figured—no way that’s a good thing. Maybe neutral, but certainly not good. I got in twenty seconds before everyone else started realizing that Blacktail had gone dark.”

  It doesn’t sound like much, but in the hyperkinetic world of modern market flow, twenty seconds is an eternity.

  “What’d you make?”

  Johnny looked at me. “Tell you what, tonight’s on me.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Two point six.”

  “For twenty seconds of trading.”

  “Isn’t life grand?”

  Outside young businessmen and women, leaving work, wandered toward the Soho bars. Dan’s was half full. A steady buzz of plates clanking and conversation and WPKN on the radio kept the background lively.

  “Are they going to let you keep it?”

  “That’s a good question. We’ll see.”

  “I thought—after the flash crash and the last October surprise—they put policy in place. Sixty percent. Sounds like you exceeded that.”

  Dominated by unregulated and totally out-of-control high-volume trading, all the markets—not just the NYSE—had become disturbingly unsettled in the last few years. Unexpected events seemed to occur more and more often, each time precipitating jaw-dropping swings in value. And it usually only took a few minutes, or even just a few seconds, for shockwaves to hammer through the entire universe of tradeable assets.

  Instead of fixing the root problem—a simple half-percent transaction tax would have done the trick—the exchanges and the regulators tinkered with marginal solutions. One was to declare, arbitrarily, that any trade executed on a price swing exceeding 60 percent would be subsequently canceled.

  “Sure, they put the rule in place,” Johnny said. “And about five minutes later every trader on the Street had reprogrammed his stops at fifty-nine percent.”

  “You too?”

  “What do you think? I mean, it’s like the state police announcing, in advance, every one of their speed traps. Of course I made the limits automatic.”

  Although, in truly panicky situations, stop orders can miss by a mile. In the end, human intervention is always best, as I think Johnny was trying to tell me.

  “It’s something to be proud of,” he said. “How many people can say they crashed the total fucking market all by themselves?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Hey, you’re not eating. How about some grits and gravy?”

  Zeke and I had left behind a dr
amatic crime scene. Saxon’s operatives had apparently fled—or if they were talking, the cops were being remarkably closemouthed about it. I had no idea where VINs and registrations on the truck would lead, but the Fusion’s rental record was not obscured well enough to hold off the two hundred FBI agents reportedly on the case.

  Trying to blow up Times Square is one thing. Taking down the foundation of American capitalism is quite another.

  When they caught up with him, Hayden Pennerton was going to have some explaining to do.

  “By the way,” said Johnny, “why are you even out in public?”

  Good question.

  “If my number’s up, my number’s up,” I said. But the truth was, I figured Zeke and I were still pretty well covered. At the airport rental desk I’d worn driver’s gloves, a ball cap, the tinted glasses and another slug of Panzer cologne. The explosion at Blacktail would have burned off other prints, DNA, and so forth. The forces of order might get lucky, but we hadn’t posted suicide videos on a jihadist website or left behind a wadded-up utility bill or bought our guns a week ago in Virginia and signed our real names to the paperwork—which is how these cases always seem to get solved.

  Unless Johnny was an FBI informant, it would be an uphill investigation.

  Still, for a moment he almost looked concerned. “Maybe I shouldn’t be seen with you.”

  “Dan doesn’t pay attention.”

  “Dan died a year ago.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you know that? Some Korean family bought out the estate.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I realized the food had improved lately.

  “I didn’t cause the damage,” I said. “They were shooting at us. You want villains, talk to Blacktail.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m sure the cops are.”

  I pushed some hash around my plate, trying not to check the doors and windows too often or too obviously.

  “I could use some help,” I said.

  “Yeah? Judge Dredd time?”

  “Well—”

  “Kidding.” He raised his fork briefly. “Whatever you need.”

  “See if you can find Blacktail’s fingerprints on any of the others. Even Plank. I know he’s not dead yet, but there’s all kinds of action in the stock. Do you have any sources that can read the order flow?”