Dunne would also be able to see and hear, through Rosenberg’s phone, what happened in the trading room at Maison Suisse, if his other plans were derailed.
* * *
The two men talked through three more rounds of whiskey and beer at the bar, and a double-vodka nightcap back at Rosenberg’s loft. Rosenberg grew melancholy as the night wore on, asking his old friend if he still respected him.
“You seem to have a guilty conscience, buddy,” said Howe.
“You think?” Rosenberg stroked his goatee and finished off his vodka.
“The root of suffering is attachment.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a Buddhist saying. It means I’m going to set you free. Do you really want to go to the Party Monday morning on the Avenue of the Americas?”
“How do you know about that? It’s a big secret.”
“I know everything, Jake. I would advise you not to go, my friend. Technology is fickle. You never know what might go wrong.”
“Oh, bullshit,” said Rosenberg. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m definitely drunk, but so what? That’s why I’m offering to help an old pal. If you decide to take a powder on Monday, I’ll be waiting from eight to eight-fifteen at the Starbucks a block from Avenue of the Americas.”
“You’re nuts. These people are killers. If I don’t show up, my ass is grass.”
Howe raised a finger, pointing heavenward.
“Ceasing to do evil, cultivating the good, purifying the heart: This is the teaching of the Buddhas.”
“You’re losing it, Jason. But I’ll think about it.”
47 Manhattan – June 2018
Sunday morning at five a.m., Michael Dunne hailed a cab in Lower Manhattan and gave the driver an address in Brooklyn. He carried a backpack full of the electronic equipment he would need later in the day. Sitting in the backseat of the taxi, obscured from the driver’s view by a bulletproof barrier, he put on a pair of surgical gloves. From the pack he took a new syringe and a plastic tube containing an anesthetic drug called Propofol. He drew a full dose into the syringe and capped the needle. He laid the syringe carefully in the pocket of his jacket and returned the other material to his pack.
The driver took the Brooklyn Bridge and the cab rolled across the top of Bedford-Stuyvesant into Bushwick. Hector Alarcon’s place was in the eastern corner of the neighborhood, toward the cemetery. It was a semidetached house, with bars on the windows and new aluminum siding. His slice of the American pie.
Alarcon went on duty at Maison Suisse at seven-thirty on Sunday mornings. Dunne had figured that Alarcon would leave his home around six-thirty, and he had it right almost to the minute. Dunne waited in the alley closest to the house, and when Alarcon stepped out his front door and began walking to the Halsey Street subway station, he followed him.
The Venezuelan man was short, with a thin beard and dark features, neatly dressed in pressed chinos and a plaid cotton summer shirt. He was listening to music on a fat old pair of headphones.
The Sunday morning street was empty, and after a hundred yards Dunne made his move. He gently laid down his backpack and moved toward Alarcon at a faster pace. As they approached an alley mid-block, he doubled his steps. As he moved past the Venezuelan, he grabbed his left arm and injected the needle containing the Propofol. He pushed the plunger all the way. Alarcon waved his arms for a moment and then slumped, and in three seconds he was out cold.
Dunne dragged the inert body toward the alley and pulled it behind a parked car, so that it would be harder to see from the street. He retrieved his backpack and returned to Alarcon.
For Dunne, it was a kind of muscle memory. He’d done this before in training and, a few times, for real. The target, surprised from behind and listening to his music, never saw the attack coming and couldn’t have identified his assailant.
Propofol is a wonderful drug. In addition to knocking people out, it makes them forget. Alarcon would sleep for several hours, with the dose Dunne had given him; when he woke up, he’d have only the dimmest memory of what had happened to him.
Dunne went through his pockets and found two identification badges, one issued by the company that maintained security for the whole building at 1978 Avenue of the Americas, the other for Maison Suisse’s security system on the sixth floor. He pocketed both, along with Alarcon’s driver’s license. He took his credit cards, too, and $250 in cash, and left the wallet atop Alarcon’s chest, as if it had been discarded there by a thief.
Alarcon was wearing a Houston Astros baseball cap with the name of Venezuelan baseball star Jose Altuve on the back. Dunne took the cap and put it on his own head.
* * *
Dunne walked a quarter mile west and then hailed a taxi that took him to midtown. He entered the private bank’s building at the service entrance, a little early, and badged in, his cap pulled low over his head in the unlikely case that anyone was monitoring surveillance cameras early on a Sunday morning. He carried his backpack low, so that it would be shielded by his body from any camera.
He took the service elevator to the sixth floor and badged into the Maison Suisse employee entrance. Nobody else had arrived. He sat on a bench in the locker room that was used by the cleaning staff and carefully removed the contents of his pack: the pin cameras, needle microphones, and other surveillance tools that Howe had procured in Palo Alto. At the bottom of the pack were two processors: a small booster unit to capture, amplify, and relay the signals, and a modem router that would post the information to the Internet using a prepaid 3G phone card bought with cash. Anyone sniffing frequencies would see it as just another smartphone talking to a cell phone tower.
Dunne moved quickly into the main trading room, hiding each device in the spot he had selected, making sure that no traces were visible. He concealed the signal booster and router in cupboards used for office supplies.
Dunne had installed all the equipment by 7:25, and he was on the service elevator heading down and out the door just before the two junior workers assigned for that morning arrived at 7:30. He was back home in Tribeca by 8:30.
Dunne was hungry, and he found a restaurant open near the Hudson River docks. He bought a Sunday New York Times, but the news depressed him. The country was going down the toilet. He wondered how he could have been stupid enough to have voted for the president in 2016, but he knew the answer. He had been angry.
* * *
Sunday night, Dunne called Rick Bogdanovich at home in Pittsburgh. The Bureau could track his location eventually, but after Monday it wouldn’t matter.
Bogdanovich’s place was in Penn Hills, up the Allegheny, a cozy suburb that was a world away from the gritty, dispossessed industrial relics along the Monongahela. He was eating dinner with his family when Dunne’s call came in, and it took the FBI man a moment to finish chewing what was in his mouth and say hello. When he realized it was Dunne on the other end, he exploded.
“Where the hell are you? I trusted you, goddamn it! You screwed me.”
“Calm down, Rick. I’m sorry I took a runner after you’d given me a safe house and a cover. I had no choice.”
“Bullshit. Everyone has a choice. Your friend Ellison turned over this CIA guy last night. He says you kidnapped him. Where are you? I’m bringing you in.”
“It’s not going to work that way,” said Dunne firmly.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? If you’re threatening an FBI special agent, you are stupider than I thought. You keep this up and next time it won’t be Petersburg but a supermax, and you’ll never be released.”
Dunne was undeterred. He could hear Bogdanovich’s wife calling out, asking if everything was okay, and saying she would put his dinner in the oven to keep it warm.
“Here’s how it’s going to work,” said Dunne. “I have identified a series of people who are committing major financial crimes against the United States. They have assistance from inside the U.S. government. You’ve already got one of them, Adrian Whi
te.”
“Don’t give me this crap. White says you jumped him and held him hostage. Your friend Ellison claims that isn’t true, but I don’t believe him.”
“Forget about Adrian White. He’s small fish. I am going to lead you to some very powerful people. You’re going to watch them incriminate themselves, in the act of committing fraud, if you’ll shut up and trust me, and then you can arrest them.”
“I’m going to arrest you, Mike, as soon as I have the opportunity. Don’t make this worse. Come in now. I’ll try to get you a deal.”
“No,” said Dunne, louder. “That’s not how it’s going to happen. I’m going to tell you what to do, and you can either listen to me and be a hero, or ignore what I say and look like a complete fucking dumbbell. You choose.”
Bogdanovich was silent for a moment, then responded.
“I’m listening.”
“Tomorrow morning at ten a.m., a group of conspirators will meet in Manhattan at the office of a foreign-owned bank. The conspirators will demonstrate new technology they have developed for disrupting financial markets. They will attempt to gain the cooperation of one or more financial partners. I have the whole place wired for audio and video. If you go in early, you will fuck the whole thing up. Do you understand?”
“I hear the words.”
“Hey, Rick, do you understand what I’m saying? If you try to bust this too early, you’ll get nothing. You have to let this run. It’s going to be streaming on every cable news channel on the planet, so just watch. When you’ve heard enough, break down the door and arrest them.”
“What’s the address in Manhattan where all this is going to happen?”
“Not yet, Rick. You have to promise me that you won’t move too early and blow this up.”
Bogdanovich made a noise that was a mixture of curse words and phlegm. “Listen, shithead, you don’t get to ask for promises. You just committed a major felony.”
“Then no address. I’ll do this myself. Or let the NYPD make the collar.”
Dunne’s threat to give credit to another law enforcement agency got the FBI cyber expert’s attention in a personal way.
“This is the Bureau’s case. I’m not giving it up. Let’s talk about it. What’s the price?”
“If I give you the address of this bank, you won’t go in early. And just to make sure, I’ll be watching. If you break your word, I’ll pull the plug and the deal’s off.”
“I don’t make promises to potential criminal defendants, obviously. But it would be counter to FBI procedure if, when we are given the location of a prospective financial crime, we interrupt that criminal activity before we have sufficient evidence to make a prosecution. Statement of normal procedure. Okay? Is that good enough for you?”
“And you promise that you’ll follow normal procedures in this case?”
“Yes. Of course. I promise to do my job.”
“Okay. The bank is called Maison Suisse. It’s located at 1978 Avenue of the Americas. The trading room where this will go down is on the sixth floor. The action will start at ten o’clock. It will be a demonstration. I’d give it ten, fifteen minutes.”
“How will we know when it’s going down?”
“I’ve wired the room for audio and video and will feed it to a site called Paladinvideo.net. The password is ‘Petersburg2017!’ You got that?”
“Web address is ‘Paladinvideo.net.’ Password is ‘Petersburg2017!’”
“Correct. Unless I’ve screwed up, you’ll have perfect audio and video. When you see the fraudulent trading technology, then move in with whatever task force you want.”
“If you’re messing with me, I swear to God—” Bogdanovich began, but Dunne cut him off.
“Save the threats, Rick. We’re way past that. You’ve got a lot of work to do tonight to get a team ready. And remember, if you don’t play by the rules we agreed on, this deal is off the table.”
“I used to think you were a stupid hothead who had learned his lesson and wised up. Now I don’t know what you are.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Dunne. He ended the call.
48 Manhattan – June 2018
The building was an eight-story office block, faced with black glass, that stood amid a forest of taller buildings. The main entrance was on Avenue of the Americas, near Radio City Music Hall. New Yorkers called it Sixth Avenue, even though Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had officially changed the name in 1945 hoping to woo Latin American businesses and diplomatic missions. That had failed, but the avenue had managed to attract one Geneva-based Swiss private bank.
Dunne had taken a suite at the New York Sheraton, a block west. He moved in with Jason Howe on Sunday evening, after he made his call to Bogdanovich in Pittsburgh. The two began assembling their array of links and computer monitors to capture the audio and video feeds coming from Maison Suisse. They gathered the feeds on Paladinvideo.net, a password-protected site Dunne had created many weeks earlier. If all went well Monday morning, they would stream the best footage to Internet social media platforms and then push it out to YouTube and cable news channels.
Howe was deft at wiring this system. He had spent years creating social media sites to advance his causes, through Fallen Empire and his other crusades. Now he created a YouTube channel and repurposed several Facebook pages he had opened several years earlier in his social-banditry days. He was lost in his work, listening to music and intermittently singing passages of songs; he stopped, pulled the buds out of his ears, and turned to Dunne. The smile on his face was at once mischievous and angelic.
“This is the best.” Howe beamed. “I mean, exposing evil actions by bad people, in a nice hotel.”
Dunne ordered room service late in the evening, but the food was mostly left untouched. The two men were focused on their computers, setting each parameter, double-checking each connection, watching test footage, reframing it, checking audio levels. At midnight, Dunne told Howe they needed to get some sleep. They would be up again at five to fine-tune their systems. Howe agreed, but he stayed up for another hour playing with his new toys.
* * *
Maison Suisse employees began arriving at seven-thirty Monday morning. First came a wing of early birds, mostly traders, leaving the elevator and making their way to their desks. Howe monitored this video footage and framed and edited it, making sure he had the volume levels right and could see and hear what was being said in every part of the room.
The trading floor was brightly lit and crowded with desks. Most of them had four computer screens, so that traders could talk in chat rooms, monitor news, read the latest charts and graphs and other market intelligence, and do their buying and selling, all at once. Even as the desks began to fill up, the room was quiet. People didn’t shout questions or command underlings. If they wanted something, they sent a chat message. On one side of the room, facing the street, was a row of offices for the senior managers, along with a small conference room. That area seemed to be the office gathering place; Dunne had covered it with several cameras and microphones.
At 7:50, Howe rose from his chair in their suite at the Sheraton. Dunne didn’t pay attention at first. He thought his partner was stretching, or going to the bathroom, but when Howe headed toward the front door of the suite, Dunne called out.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“I’m meeting Rosenberg. I told him Saturday night that I would bring him in from the cold, if he wanted out.”
Dunne, normally composed, was flustered. His cheeks reddened with surprise and anger.
“Are you crazy? He’s not trustworthy. And we need his cell phone as a backup if the other systems go down.”
“The other systems work fine. It’s good karma to try to help Rosenberg. He’s my friend. You save your people, I’ll save mine.”
Howe walked out the door and down the hall to the elevator bank. Dunne thought about trying to stop him, but he stayed where he was. Howe was right: They probably didn’t need Rosenberg’s phone, and it
was good to keep faith with your friends, even when it carried risks.
Howe pulled up the hood of his jacket and walked to Starbucks. He stood in a dark corner for fifteen minutes, as he had promised. Nobody was watching the place, he was confident. But there was no sign of Rosenberg.
By eight-thirty, Howe was back upstairs in the suite at the Sheraton, at his screens again.
“Thanks,” was all he said to Dunne. Then he put his buds back in his ears and began singing to himself again, as the last minutes ticked away.
* * *
The members of the Consortium began arriving just before nine-thirty. The camera Dunne had placed at the entry to the trading room captured their arrival.
Lorenzo Ricci held the elevator door open for a woman who followed just behind him. She wore a classic navy-blue Chanel suit. Her hair was sculpted close to the head so what people saw wasn’t the hairdo but the perfect lines of her face and the arctic-blue eyes. As she walked, she placed each heel as deliberately as a runway model.
Dunne knew the hidden weight her name carried: Adele Kruse Hecht.
“Start the feed to the Paladin channel,” said Dunne. He had promised Bogdanovich that if the FBI stayed back, he would share everything he had.
The New York Stock Exchange rang its opening bell just as the two entered the crowded trading floor. Around the room, screens were lighting up and chat room messages were flashing, but most of the traders had their eyes fixed on the elegant woman who had just entered the room.
Adele Hecht had launched countless trades and made tens of billions of dollars for her clients, all of it, she always claimed, by what she called inspiration, which was really a calculation of the odds and weighing of risks, and then, instant decision.
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