Vertigo

by Wesley Cross

  “There’s a reason I stayed away from you for all these years,” Vic spat. “I knew you were a thug, but you’re even worse than I could’ve possibly imagined. Torturing people? Who does that? What kind of a monster are you?”

  “And yet, when you wanted to get information from someone, you had my people get it from him,” Victor Ye observed coldly. “Lied to them too, pretending I was okay with your plan. Doesn’t it make you a monster too?”

  “I had no idea they were going to torture the poor shmuck,” Vic cried out. “I thought they’d scare him; rough him up a little, but torture?”

  Victor Ye bent over and slapped his son in the face with the back of his hand. The force of the impact was hard enough to make Vic feel the whiplash.

  “Stop the hysterics, you bloody idiot,” Victor Ye said and nodded to the two cops silently standing on either side of the chair. “Teach some respect to this young man.”

  Vic cringed and pulled his head closer to the chest, as a boxer dodging a hard hook, but there was nowhere to escape. The shower of hits came from both sides, the hard punches landing on his torso and the head. Within seconds, he was disoriented, the primal part of him trying to break the bonds and run. The pain quickly reached a crescendo and then Vic started to drift away.

  The beating stopped as suddenly as it had begun and Vic groaned as the sweet darkness that was about to envelop him disappeared. He couldn’t open one eye, and his nose was bleeding profusely, the bright red pouring over his white shirt and light-blue pants.

  “Now,” the man standing in front of him said, “you and I haven’t been on speaking terms for many years. How long has it been, eh?”

  “Not long enough,” Vic breathed out.

  “You have some spirit, I’ll give you that, but next time you want to use my resources, I’d like you to get permission first. It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

  Vic looked up and tried to spit at the man, but his swollen lips refused to comply.

  “What were you looking for?” his father asked. “What information did you need from that man?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Vic said. “It’s a pity nobody will tell you as I’m assuming the guy’s dead.”

  “You’re not dead,” his father observed. “Not yet.”

  “Well,” Vic shrugged, regretting the gesture at once, as the sharp pain pierced his ribs, “you can kill me, but I’m not going to tell you anything.”

  “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard people say that,” Victor Ye said, “and yet, they always spill the beans in the end. It’s human nature.”

  “Go to hell. I’m not afraid of you, asshole,” Vic said. “If you think you can use your mind tricks on me, you’re wrong.”

  “You see,” the man bent over, putting his face close to Vic’s, “everyone has a pressure point. Some people are terrified of physical pain and will tell you anything because you say you’re about to hurt them. Others aren’t afraid of pain at all, and yet start jumping out of their pants to tell you what you want to know when you bring up their loved ones.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Oh. This is amusing. You think I don’t know about your little pet? What’s her name?” Victor Ye snapped his fingers a few times as if trying to remember. “Helen? Helen Chen?”

  “Don’t you dare—” Vic started, but his breath caught as one of the cops struck him in the stomach. It took him a few agonized tries to pull some air into his lungs before he finally succeeded.

  “So, which one are you, I wonder?” his father continued. “Will you tell me when I start breaking your bones, or will you rather wait until I start breaking the bones of your girlfriend who you so foolishly brought to my warehouse?”

  “Don’t you fucking touch her,” Vic screamed. “Don’t you touch her, you fucking monster.”

  “I think we have a winner,” Victor said and made a sweeping gesture as if he was presenting in front of a large audience.

  “It has nothing to do with you,” Vic screamed. “Please, don’t hurt her. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “People working for some corporation killed her sister,” Vic said. “She wanted to make them lose some money, that’s all. I swear, it has nothing to do with you. Please don’t hurt her, I’m begging you.”

  “I promise.” Victor Ye straightened up and raised his right hand. “Tell me what she was trying to do, and I will not touch her.”

  “She was just trying to hack some company,” Vic said, hot tears running down his face. “I told you—they killed her sister. I swear, it wasn’t about your stupid gang.”

  “What was the name of the company, son?”

  “Guardian Manufacturing,” Vic said. “You promised. Please.”

  “I believe you,” his father said and nodded to the cops. “Let him go. And don’t you worry—I will not touch your girl.”

  26

  September 2007

  New York

  “I thought, at least during that conversation, that you were speaking figuratively,” Andrew Hunt said as he watched Audrey pace the kitchen. “As in we bring the bad guys to heel, and make the world a better place. I didn’t realize you actually meant something else.”

  It was five in the afternoon, and the low-hanging sun shining through the kitchen’s floor-to-ceiling windows set her blonde hair ablaze as she walked. She looked like a prophet, preaching to a skeptical crowd, he thought. Convinced of her higher truth, but in need to translate it into simpler words for those who were reluctant to follow.

  They returned from the camp the night before, where Rick Porter was taking charge and starting to build what would become the special operations teams for the Unit. It wasn’t going without hiccups—one of the recruits, Sean Young, a baby-faced favorite on Mike Connelly’s team, was killed by a ricochet during a live-fire exercise.

  They all knew there were risks of people getting hurt or even killed, but seeing a young man, a father of two, go into a body bag was a sobering sight. It rattled Andrew, and he could see that Audrey was taking it hard, too.

  “No, I wasn’t hypothetical at all,” she said. “We’re fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. The cabal doesn’t follow the same rules that we do.”

  “Well,” Andrew interjected, “that is not exactly true. The whole purpose of setting up a black ops division is not to follow the regular rules. We have the power to eliminate our enemies, to be what they call the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but that’s only a part of it. Our similarities end with the notion that neither we nor the cabal operatives want to get caught. Even the outcome of getting caught is almost the same—for them, it means jail; for us, it means the end of funding, and, well, also jail. But what follows is completely different.”

  “Different how?”

  “For us, if we get caught, or the president changes his mind, or if the funding runs out for any reason, that’s it—that’s the end of the road. For them—they dispose of their apprehended operatives and hire somebody else. How’s that a level playing field? We get only one shot of getting things right, where they can do it over and over again.”

  “So, what exactly do you propose?”

  “We need independence—from everybody, including the president.” Audrey stopped pacing and climbed on the stool at the breakfast bar. “To get that, we’ll have to be ruthless, and we actually have a good example to follow—our own government.”

  “Go on.” Andrew took a seat opposite her, planted his elbows on the marble table, and rested his chin on the back of his hand.

  “The War on Drugs, for instance,” she continued. “What do we do with all that seized money? Billions of dollars. Do we burn it? Bury it? Give it to orphans?”

  “No,” Andrew volunteered. “It goes back to the agency that seized it in the first place.”

  “Exactly.” Audrey pointed a finger at him. “All we have for now is a measly fifty million dollars a
year. A trickle that can dry up at any moment for some reason or for no reason at all. Is this how we’re planning to fight an international conglomerate that’s made up of companies whose combined value is greater than a GDP of a developed country? We are bound to fail if this is our plan.”

  “I know where you’re going. But they’ll hang us for treason if we get caught,” Andrew said, “and Jim will never go for it, nor will the president.”

  “Jim will understand,” she said with passion he never saw before, “and we can keep the White House in the dark about this. May I remind you of something—you didn’t want to bring them in at all in the beginning. But to fight a successful criminal enterprise, we need to almost become one ourselves. Self-sufficient, multifaceted, well-funded.”

  “You’ve seen the report from the ISCD about their possible drug operations in Afghanistan,” Andrew said. “Is it what got you thinking?”

  “Yes. You said it yourself—we have to follow the money. It’s the right approach. All I’m suggesting is that instead of pulling on the thread to see where it leads, we hit them hard and appropriate whatever we can find. If it works—we can kill two birds with one stone: hurt their operations and finance ours.”

  “We’ll have to launder that money if we get it,” Andrew said, watching her face. “We can’t bring it to the States and deposit it in our local bank. Not if we’re planning on keeping it a secret.”

  “Um, I know this guy.” Audrey threw him an impish smile. “He’s a financial genius. If we can convince him to do that, he’ll launder that money so clean it’ll smell like roses.”

  “Very funny,” Andrew smiled back, “but in reality, it’s much harder to move dirty money through the banking system than it used to be. They’ve tightened things up quite a bit since 9/11. There’s a reason why a lot of drug money that goes back to South America from the US is now smuggled out the same way as the drugs were smuggled in—in bundles, hidden in secret compartments of cars and false floors of trucks crossing into Mexico.”

  They sat in silence for a few seconds, looking at each other. Weighing the possible consequences.

  If he wanted to be honest with himself, the idea of what she had proposed was appealing to him. Excited him even. And on a lot of levels, it made sense—what they were setting out to do was bigger than the failed War on Drugs. And if the entire US government couldn’t bring down the cartels, how on earth were they supposed to achieve an even greater goal with a few dozen men and a few million bucks?

  Of course, they could concentrate on strategic points and try to deliver precision strikes to the joints of the colossus in hopes that they would be enough to make it crumble. But at the end of the day, he thought it was likely going to be a game of whack-a-mole. A deadly game where right after they cleared up one target, another would pop up, and then another.

  “Can it be done?” she finally asked and put her hands over his. “Can we pull it off?”

  “I think we can,” he said, “but I guess we won’t know for sure until we try. One thing that keeps coming back to me, especially after seeing that young man in a body bag, is the danger we’re putting ourselves in and by extension—our son.”

  “Yeah.” She let his hands go and hugged herself. “I struggle with it too. But it’s probably for the best not to tell Jason anything we do.”

  “I talked to him once.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. In a roundabout way. Wanted to see if he’d take an analyst position, but he wasn’t even remotely interested, so I left it alone. He can’t help us now, and all we would do by disclosing it is give him another burden to carry. Let’s make sure he never needs to find out.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Here’s what we need to do,” Andrew said, standing up, making a decision. “Let’s start with that report on Afghanistan. See if we can identify where the money’s coming from. If we can do that, then we can try to hit them where it hurts and put some of that dirty cash for better use.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” He walked around the breakfast bar, picked her up in his arms, and started walking toward the bedroom. “I’ll talk to Jim today. In an hour or so.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the secret lair where I devise my plans of taking over the world.”

  “This is the most desperate line I’ve ever heard,” she said, laughing.

  “Desperate times,” he said, walking into the bedroom and placing Audrey on top of the pillows. “Desperate measures.”

  27

  September 2007

  New York

  “You said that there was a reason you wanted to do it on this Friday?” Hiroko asked.

  It was a quarter to nine in the morning, and the markets were going to be open in the next forty-five minutes. Chen set up a battle station of two powerful laptops on her kitchen table the night before and now was on her third cup of coffee, reading the news.

  She was up since four o’clock in the morning, not as much because she needed to do anything that early, but mostly because she was too anxious to sleep. The Asian markets closed with steep losses earlier after a volatile session, and their major European counterparts weren’t having a good day either.

  “Yes,” she said. “For two reasons. First off—any extra volatility helps, and Fridays are more volatile as you have a lot going on. Short-term traders will implement exit strategies so they don’t have any positions open over the weekend when the exchange is closed and they can’t react to the news cycle. You also have options expiring this weekend, so whoever holds those contracts will have to make some moves before that happens.”

  “What’s the second reason?”

  “The actual news cycle,” Chen said. “I want to amplify the effect as much as I can. The fact that it wasn’t a normal trading pattern will be obvious before the end of the day. Everybody’s going to be talking about the hack of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. But I want everybody to continue talking about it over the weekend, so it doesn’t get buried by some celebrity break-up gossip mid-week.”

  “To maximize the damage,” Hiroko said thoughtfully.

  “Exactly. The markets will be closed, no one will be able to step in and buy a perceived bargain—it’ll get just worse and worse. We can’t stop the actual merger, but if we bring enough scrutiny, we can stave it off indefinitely.”

  “Where did you learn all that stuff?”

  “I took a few courses back in college,” Chen said, “but mostly I learned this from the ramblings of my father. The markets always fascinated him, and he made some savvy investment moves that helped our family in the long run. It also made him insufferable every time the conversation touched upon the greatness of American capitalism. He always preached that this was the best system in the world and refuted the mere notion that it could be improved in any way, shape, or form.”

  “Oh, I know the type,” Hiroko smiled, “but let’s do the rundown one more time, to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “All right,” Chen said and looked at her notes. “Let’s talk about Guardian first. First, we let the markets run their course for thirty, forty-five minutes. It looks like the market’s going to open down, so if Guardian’s shares fall on their own that would help us, but at the end of the day, it’s irrelevant. Then, at some time after ten, I get in. Once I’m inside, I send you the paths to establish the mirror terminal.”

  “Right,” Hiroko checked her notes as well, “so when the trades come in, they go to me, that way the system thinks they are still going through, but we pick and choose which ones get executed.”

  “Remember, though,” Chen held up a cautionary finger, “we have to keep the rate of decline under ten percent within a rolling five-minute time period, so we don’t trip the circuit breakers. We don’t want the party to be over before it properly begins. We’ll have to play some tug-o-war with it—bring it down some, then let it recover. Then bring it down more.”

&nb
sp; “Understood,” Hiroko said. “We can stretch it out through the day. As long as you’re routing the trades to me, I can make it flow like the real thing. I’ll let it recover a few times to make it look like buyers are stepping in to snap up some of it at bargain prices. People will start getting suspicious anyway since we can’t let everybody fill all of their orders, but we can keep the charade all the way to the closing bell.”

  “Which brings us to the next stage,” Chen said. “The news. You got the files?”

  “Yep.” Hiroko smiled. “Every negative keyword I could find, in a nice little package. I can feed it to four networks at once.”

  Chen saw some parts of the file that Hiroko had compiled in the last couple of days. It would be painfully obvious to any human who happened to see the text that it was a nonsensical mix of strung together references to Guardian Manufacturing stock and some trigger words such as fraud, a significant drop in value, unsustainable, and so on.

  Fortunately for Chen, the markets were now largely driven by trading algorithms of giant financial firms, and those were the first intended consumers of their text file. The keywords would trigger the selling mechanisms of the AIs, and the market would dutifully do the rest.

  “How long do you figure it’ll take them to realize it was planted and stop it?”

  “It’s hard to tell for sure.” Hiroko shrugged. “Two, three minutes, tops. Then, if we are lucky, another one or two minutes to shut it down. But the damage will already be done. It’ll be shared and forwarded and by then it’ll take some time and effort to completely debunk it.”

  “Right,” Chen agreed, “and the last two or three minutes before the bell, we don’t have to worry about circuit breakers anymore. We can drive it down as hard as we can.”

  “It works for me,” Hiroko said, “and we do the same thing for Rapid Science, just in reverse.”