* * *
The traders were standing, applauding now, as Adele made her way across the room toward the conference room that overlooked the avenue. The men and women parted; a few of the women tried to reach out and shake her hand, or, failing that, just touch the perfect weave of her jacket.
Ricci followed behind, carrying a gray Louis Vuitton briefcase containing the computer that never left his side. His was a vulpine face, hard and predatory. But when he took off his glasses, you could see in his eyes the brilliance and ravenous curiosity that drove him.
Ricci followed Adele into the conference room, which was serving as a kind of green room before the performance that lay ahead.
Next to arrive at the elevator bank was Tom Goldman. He came alone, nodding to people on the way, on the assumption that others knew him.
Rage surged through Dunne as he watched this gathering convene. He had been manipulated at each turn of the events that surrounded his firing, prosecution, and imprisonment. Not now, he told himself. Anger will only produce more mistakes.
One more guest arrived in the elevator lobby. It was Jacob Rosenberg. He looked like a hipster: thick goatee, black leather jacket, tennis shoes, making no concession to conventional midtown standards of dress. He was carrying his iPhone in his hand, but nobody seemed to notice.
* * *
“Check this out,” called Howe from his command post.
One of the screens showed a bumpy point-of-view shot of the trading room as Rosenberg made his way past the desks toward the conference room. The malware that Howe had inserted in the phone worked. He owned that phone and everything in it.
Rosenberg joined the others in the conference room, his phone still in his hands. He stood back from the senior partners – Hecht, Ricci, and Goldman – a technician ready to display his work and assist where necessary.
* * *
As Dunne watched the parade, he had one thought, which he turned over for several minutes, as the elevator cars arrived and disgorged their passengers. He finally verbalized his concern aloud, though Howe couldn’t hear through the earbuds.
“Where the hell is George Strafe?” said Dunne. “He should be here by now. They can’t start without him. This is his show.”
* * *
The cameras and microphones in the conference room captured a similar confusion among the principals.
Ricci spoke to the boss, Madame Hecht. “Dov’è il signor Strafe. Dovrebbe essere qui ormai. Sono quasi le dieci. Non dovremmo iniziare senza lui.”
Hecht answered in English.
“Give him a few more minutes. He’s a very busy man. Maybe he wants to wear a disguise.”
She laughed at the thought of the CIA operations director donning a wig and a false beard, but Ricci nodded. Yes, maybe he was putting on a disguise.
* * *
At ten, there was a new commotion at the elevators, as the arrival bell rang. Dunne assumed it would be Strafe, finally, but it was instead two men dressed in very expensive suits. The Maison Suisse New York branch manager, an athletic man with a hearty voice, greeted them personally and walked them back to the conference room.
Tom Goldman made the introductions.
“Welcome to our party, gentlemen,” he began. “You’re the guests of honor.”
There were handshakes around the room as Goldman continued.
“I would like to present Thierry Klein and Javad Qureishi,” said Goldman. “They run private wealth funds in Cyprus and Kazakhstan. Between them they have more than three hundred billion in assets under management. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” answered Klein. He was a trim man, conservatively dressed, with hooded, pitch-black eyes.
“It’s actually a little more than that,” said Qureishi. He was hefty, well fed, with the look of an Ottoman courtier.
Goldman continued. “Our guests have signed nondisclosure agreements pledging silence about everything they will see and hear at our gathering today, witnessed by our general counsel. They report only to their principals back in Nicosia and Nursultan, respectively.”
Heads nodded. Klein raised a finger.
“We understand the sensitivity of what will be presented this morning,” offered Klein. “Our dual presence is, let me say, a mutual suicide pact. We will enforce each other’s silence.”
* * *
A block away, Dunne and Howe watched on their monitors.
“Are we ready to go live with the stream?” asked Howe. “We’re getting to the good stuff now.”
“Wait until George Strafe arrives,” said Dunne. “If they decide to go ahead without him, then we roll.”
* * *
Unseen by anyone on the sixth floor, or by Dunne and Howe at their monitors, a small group had gathered in the stairwell of the floor below, by confidential agreement with the chief of building security.
They had arrived an hour earlier, through a tunnel from the building next door. The building security director, a former FBI man himself, accompanied the group up the back stairs, scouting to make sure each flight was empty and secure. Behind him was Joe Sheehan, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, accompanied by Rick Bogdanovich, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Cyber-Forensics lab in Pittsburgh.
A third senior official had joined the team that morning at Sheehan’s request. He stood just behind the two SACs, collar up, brown hair stiff as if he hadn’t showered in a week, dressed in an undertaker’s suit, his face pitted by scars that had never quite healed.
Behind him stood a half dozen agents in their nylon FBI jackets, including two carrying the battering ram that would knock down the stairwell door when it was time to move.
Bogdanovich, at the head of the group, had opened a laptop computer, on which he and Sheehan were watching a video feed of the action from the floor above.
“It’s past ten,” said Sheehan. “They’re late.”
“Relax,” said Bogdanovich. “They haven’t done anything yet.”
“This guy they’re waiting for,” said the man in the black suit. He spoke the words almost whimsically. “I don’t think he’s going to show up.”
* * *
“We’ve waited long enough,” said Adele Hecht magisterially. “It’s time to show our guests what our engineers have created. Lorenzo, perhaps you could lead the demonstration.”
Ricci stepped to the center of the group. He unbuttoned his blazer, and then buttoned it again. He spoke in a voice that combined the rhyme and rolling syntax of his native Italian with the round, ripe tones of Atlanta, Georgia, where he had done his studies.
“My name is Lorenzo Ricci,” he said. “I am a computer scientist. With my team, I have done what we like to talk about often in the laboratory, but are able to do not so often, which is to change reality. Not forever, I am happy to say, but for long enough that people can profit from it. People like you, and us.”
“I’m all ears,” said Qureishi, who represented the massive, subterranean wealth of Kazakhstan.
“Myself, as well,” said Klein, who spoke for Cyprus, the oligarchs’ private banking hub.
“This is the real ‘Alpha,’ if I may say,” continued Ricci. “Not just the skill to recognize unique value, the return that is above the mean, but the ability to create that value. To make the trading opportunities appear, and then act on them. As San Giovanni reminds us: ‘All’inizio era la parola.’ In the beginning was the word.”
* * *
Dunne, watching the monitors a block away, shouted out to Howe.
“Take it live from here on. Push it to Facebook, YouTube, every platform you’ve got.”
Howe moved deftly at several keyboards, sending the video stream, inset with a point-of-view feed from Rosenberg’s iPhone camera. It was an arresting, startling video that conveyed immediately to viewers that they were watching something secret and stealthy happening in real time.
* * *
Sheehan listened to Ricci’s little speech about “Alpha”
and nudged Bogdanovich.
“What do you think? Should we move in now?” The two agents carrying the ram hefted it to their shoulders. The other members of the team unholstered their pistols, preparing to go through the open door, up the stairs, and into the trading room above.
“Not yet,” said the man with the pitted face. “It gets better.”
49 Manhattan – June 2018
Lorenzo Ricci powered on a large video monitor in the conference room. He removed his computer from the briefcase and placed it with a flourish on the conference table. He removed his cashmere jacket and folded it neatly over a chair, revealing his crisp shirt of fine Egyptian cotton. It took only a few moments for his computer to boot up. He turned to the group. Ricci made a flourish with his hand, like a magician about to begin a trick.
“Listen carefully, my friends and fellow investors: In about sixty seconds, when I activate a program instruction, certain servers of the data center in New Jersey that backs up records of all trades on the New York Stock Exchange will be corrupted. The backup data will no longer match the trading records that have been generated by the main system. There will be a… discontinuity.”
“You can do that?” asked Qureishi, wide-eyed.
“Yes. I can do that. When algorithms detect these anomalies, the system will halt trading. For a time, no financial firm that holds shares of firms listed on the NYSE will be certain what the prices are, or the value of its positions. It will take many hours, perhaps days, to reconstruct reliable price and trade data.”
“Oh, my god!” said Klein. “That is the scariest thing I ever heard.”
“Perhaps the most profitable,” said Ricci. “Now, before I push the button, would anyone like to call his trading desk and short Dow or S&P 500 futures?”
“No,” said Klein.
“Yes,” said Qureishi, almost at the same time.
“Yes,” said Klein, correcting his answer.
The two fund managers moved to separate corners of the room and called the people who ran their trading desks. Each took a relatively conservative bet, one shorting the equivalent of $5 billion in futures, the other about $2.5 billion, cut into multiple orders to prevent detection. In terms of their overall portfolios, these were modest amounts, but this was a test, after all. A proof of concept.
* * *
Out on the trading floor, a few of the portfolio managers had tuned to CNBC, which was cutting intermittently to what it described as a “bizarre, unconfirmed event” at a bank in Manhattan. The Maison Suisse employees recognized their conference room, but most thought it was a joke or a prank of some sort.
The phones and message boards began to light up, too, as friends from other banks and funds on the Street began to call, wondering: What the hell? But people are always slow to recognize the drama that doesn’t sneak up on them, that’s happening right in their midst.
* * *
The New York branch manager thought his bosses should know they were on television, at least. He was knocking on the door, interrupting Ricci’s presentation. Adele Hecht opened the door a crack and said icily, “Not now.”
Ricci saluted her. “Have you placed your bets?” he asked the two fund managers.
The two men said yes, and the Italian typed a command into his computer.
“The disaggregation process will take between fifteen minutes and a half hour. Then you should begin to see the first signs of market disorientation, as new prices fail to match old recorded prices.”
Klein looked at his watch. “Can I increase my short position?”
Ricci nodded, and the two men called their trading desks.
“I’d like each of you also to make a leveraged bet for me, please. As much as your desks can handle.”
The two bankers scrambled to comply.
“I want you to remember,” Ricci said when the bankers had given their orders, “that this technology is proprietary. We can create these effects whenever we want in the future. We – the partners in this venture – will essentially hold the power to disorder the financial markets as we choose, or refrain from doing so, at a price.”
“Sweet,” said Goldman, unable to suppress any longer his appreciation for what Ricci and his engineers had accomplished.
“I have one more piece of technology that I would like to show you, please,” said Ricci, “with the assistance of my colleague Mr. Jacob Rosenberg.”
Rosenberg stepped forward, iPhone in hand. By now several million people were watching, including many of the Maison Suisse traders out on the floor. There was a pounding at the conference room door again, more insistent. Hecht sharply warned those on the other side not to bother them again and turned the lock.
* * *
“Now, for Christ’s sakes!” said Sheehan down on the fifth floor.
The man with the pitted face and upturned collar nodded. “Yes, now.”
The FBI team rushed up the stairs to the sixth floor, where the lead agents wielded their battering ram to splinter the door. The squad burst into the trading room, guns drawn, shouting: “Arms in the air! This is the FBI.”
* * *
Ricci, oblivious to the commotion, asked Rosenberg to cue the video, which appeared on the conference room monitor.
“Do either of you have positions in the shares of Humford Holdings?” asked Ricci.
Both Klein and Qureishi said they did; one was long on the stock, the other short.
“You will find this of interest,” said Ricci. He clicked the arrow to start the video and there on the screen was the face of one of the most familiar men in the investment world, Howard Schubert.
“I have some bad news that I need to share with my team,” Schubert said on the vertical cube of the iPhone video, his voice recognizable, but gruff and raspy from stress.
“I visited with my doctor a week ago to see what was causing blood in my urine and other discomforts. The doctor did exploratory surgery, to see what might be wrong. I’m sorry to say…”
There was pounding on the door again, this time not the branch manager of Maison Suisse, but a voice shouting: “Open up, FBI!” The sorrowful voice continued on the iPhone video that was being displayed on the monitor.
“…I am sorry to say that I received the results of the biopsy yesterday. The doctor told me that I have stage four bladder cancer. The operation will take place next week.”
“Poor Howard,” said Klein sorrowfully.
“Where did you get this?” asked Qureishi.
“It’s fake,” said Ricci, proudly. “It’s money in your pocket if you trade on it now.”
Just then the door burst down, and into the room walked the two FBI chiefs, followed by George Strafe.
* * *
“You bastard!” Michael Dunne screamed at the monitor. It was prolonged wail of rage, like the agony of a grieving spouse or the convulsive sob of a parent who has lost a child. Then he stopped and was utterly silent for a moment.
Dunne walked over to Howe, who was transfixed by what he was watching on the screen.
“That’s George Strafe. That’s my boss, the man who destroyed my life. The prick found a way to change sides.”
Dunne looked around the room, uncertain what to do, and then grabbed a jacket that was lying on a couch. He went into the bedroom and found the pistol he had locked in the safe; he stuck it in the back of his pants and then, after a moment’s reflection, put it back in the safe. But he withdrew something else: the slim, long-bladed knife he had used to threaten Adrian White.
“I have to go,” said Dunne. “Keep the video feed running until someone tells you to turn it off.”
50 Manhattan – June 2018
Dunne ran through the Sheraton lobby and pushed his way up the street to the side entrance of the black cube that housed Maison Suisse. A crowd of people had gathered outside, office workers who been watching on cable television or YouTube feeds and had rushed out of neighboring buildings to watch the bizarre drama unfold. They were pointing up to the sixt
h floor where the events were happening live. Some people in the crowd were shouting, “Fake News.” A left-wing group began chanting, “Hey-hey, ho-ho. Maison Suisse has got to go.”
Dunne still had Hector Alarcon’s badge, which got him through the first perimeter of employee security. He took the stairs to the fifth floor and, seeing that access to the floor above was blocked by an FBI agent, he crossed thirty yards along a service corridor at the back of the building to a small stairway he’d seen on the floor plans. He opened the fifth-floor door, setting off a security alarm, ran up the stairs, and kicked open the door on the sixth floor, setting off another set of bells.
No one noticed: The trading room was pandemonium already.
Stunned traders crowded the floor, each craning for a view of the conference room, which was now surrounded by FBI officers. Ricci, Goldman, and Hecht had been put in handcuffs, along with Klein and Qureishi, the two fund managers.
Dunne pushed his way across the room, shouldering aside gawkers, so that he intercepted the law enforcement group and its prisoners just as they were turning the corner toward the elevator. Sheehan was in front, followed by Bogdanovich and Strafe, and behind them the agents who were marching each of the arrestees forward.
Dunne pressed toward them. An FBI man at the perimeter tried to stop him, but Dunne shouted, “Hey, Rick, it’s me.” His agitation caught Bogdanovich’s eye.
“Let him through,” said Bogdanovich. He pulled Dunne’s arm as he approached and grasped him in a bear hug.
“This is the guy who made it happen,” he said to Sheehan, his colleague. “This is the man, right here.”
The Paladin Page 31
