The Valley of Shadows - eARC

by John Ringo

  “This isn’t about profit,” Tom insisted. “This is about giving the system as long as possible to find a solution to the virus. If, IF, we evacuate, the timing is my call—as we all agreed. And I can’t make that call until the bank pulls the handle. I’m still here. My family is still here. You get your seats out when I get the direction from my boss. If you can find a better arrangement elsewhere, I suggest that you take it.”

  The cop stood, neither angrily nor especially forcefully. He simply stood up.

  “I’ll push on the precincts next to Overture,” Dominguez said, his voice flat. “Slow down their deal, maybe. Might need some of that vaccine you bought, Smith, to sweeten the pot. There still isn’t enough to go around. But we’re out of time. You’ll see.”

  He left the room without fanfare. Tom and Matricardi looked the question at Kohn.

  “His wife overdosed,” she said. “Fatal. All he has are the kids.”

  “Ah, shit,” Matricardi said with a sigh. “Makes sense now. How can we help? This is still the best deal—for all our sakes we gotta make this work.”

  Kohn looked at the door that her colleague closed.

  “I know that it seems grim Mr. Matricardi, but I agree with Mr. Smith. We just need to hold fast.”

  Tom looked at her, sensing something that wasn’t quite right.

  * * *

  “Put together a backpack with fifty complete courses of vaccine.” Smith was working through his afternoon to-do list and Rune was scribbling.

  “Who they going to, Boss?”

  “Dominguez,” Tom said. “He needs them fo—” Smith’s personal cell went off and he glanced at the number, holding up one finger towards Rune.

  “Smith…Uh-huh…Well, that’s good, at least…Wait, what…? How many zombies…? How the hell do you AD an auto-injector in your thumb…? A crowbar? For fuck’s sake, Gravy, she’s a fucking thirteen-year-old girl. In what fucking world can two Tier One operators backed by the effectively unlimited resources of an international investment bank not keep one thirteen-year-old from picking fights with zombies…in my own building…? Sure, sure, that’s what the traveling salesman said to the mother superior. See you in two. Out here.”

  Rune decided that silence was the better part of valor, so he only looked the question at the visibly agitated Smith, who was strapping on a pistol belt loaded with four mags. He started talking even as he opened a desk drawer and withdrew his SIG.

  “Faith decided that filing was boring and went for a walkabout in the basement,” Smith said angrily. “Bagged nine infected and managed to tranq herself with an auto-injector. She should be okay, but her mother is going to murder me if she finds out.”

  The intel’s specialist’s eyes bugged out a bit, but his boss was too preoccupied to notice. Mostly Paul was just glad that his name was neither “Durante” or “Kaplan” at this point. Kaplan ran physical security and executive protection for all the American BotA locations now, and since his return Durante ran all special projects including the BERTs and what everyone called the “keep Faith out of trouble” watch. Just so long as Smith didn’t immediately recall that it was Rune who gave Faith the filing assignment…

  “No idea where she gets this wild streak.” Smith slapped a magazine home and let the slide go home. “I swear to the white Christ…”

  He started walking out of his office but was already trotting before he made it past the admin’s desk, and continued accelerating towards the elevator lobby. “…fucking Durante…so much to ask?”

  Smith’s speed was a good thing in Rune’s opinion, because it kept his boss from seeing the borderline insubordinate smirk on the smaller man’s face.

  Yeah, no idea where she gets it from.

  * * *

  The scene in the basement was pure carnage. Smith had already had his niece sent up to the in-house medical clinic to be checked by Curry himself.

  Smith was in a corner, talking to both Durante and Kaplan, and though onlookers couldn’t make out the low-voiced conversation, the degree of arm waving and finger pointing coming from those three was nearly enough to create a perceptible breeze. One of the door guards who had tried out for the BERTs but quit after a couple of runs leaned over and whispered to his buddy who was staring a blood splash that went all the way up to the ceiling.

  “How the fuck does someone so itty bitty do that…?”

  He looked down at the arrangement of zombie bodies and tried to re-create the scene.

  “I mean, that crow bar is actually bent!”

  The first guy looked back over at a cluster of thigh-thick gray-water water pipes. Originally blue, they were now liberally painted red and an unidentifiable article of torn clothing as well as a hank of human hair was visibly wedged into a bundle of cabling that ran alongside the pipes.

  “I don’t know man, just don’t piss her off.”

  * * *

  “She’s crazy, Boss,” Durante said, throwing his hands up in the air. “I mean crazy in a good way, but also stone crazy as in ‘won’t listen to warnings and insists on wrestling with zombies for shits and giggles’ crazy. If she was ten years older, I’d be analyzing the hot-crazy matrix as to whether to date her—I mean apart from her idiotic love of HK…”

  “Not a time for jokes, Gravy!” Tom said, his face red with anger. “You were supposed to find her an inside job that did not involve hunting infected!”

  “I did, Boss,” Durante replied tightly. “From my POV she was AWOL from her filing job. I cannot be held responsible if an ‘employee,’ an underage child-labor employee I might add, goes off zombie hunting on her own! And we’ve all got too much on our plates to spend our time making sure she’s not randomly questing for vaccine donors! So, let me repeat, Mister Smith, sir: Your fucking niece is stone-cold insane! What am I supposed to do? Chain her to the filing cabinet?”

  Durante looked away, his cheeks reddening as well.

  Smith glared at Kaplan, who was trying hard to control his cheek muscles.

  “You! What part of check everyone for an infection even if they don’t look sick wasn’t clear?”

  * * *

  Smith worked the economics of the city. Dominguez was supposed to be the enforcer. Matricardi was equal parts criminal liaison and vaccine producer. Joanna Kohn’s role was to keep the critical bits of the city infrastructure functioning, including the police. However, her control over the remaining police was slipping. The principal lever that she retained was the supply of vaccine. That vaccine had to be used to protect the bits of the city that kept things in motion. Literally.

  So far, the recipients had been haggard with relief just to have a vaccine, even a prototype. Sooner or later questions would rise about where it came from. Of course, that meant that there had to be a later. Joanna had kept the flow of the critical drug moving to her invested parties, as well as the teamsters, the longshoremen, refineries, firemen, hospitals and most especially the uniformed police. Problem was, the latter might have another source of supply.

  There were police precincts that were rather far from the flagpole represented by Manhattan. The police in the extreme east and northeast of the city were literally on the other side of the entire jurisdiction from her base of political power. Following the second consolidation of police precincts, the force was down to less than half its original strength. In places, much less than half.

  Into that breach had stepped Big Mac Overture, the self-styled Caribbean drug lord. He had his own sizable operation. Previously he had limited his growth to the territory controlled by smaller criminal organizations, either absorbing them or eliminating them entirely. Of late, he had become even more ambitious. It was his outfit that was supplying the cops on the east side of Queens and the Bronx. She didn’t know how much vaccine Overture was producing, but the unconfirmed rumors were that he had control of two hospitals, all their equipment and such of their staff as he could extort or buy off.

  Outside, the smoky gray haze from the overnight fires across t
he river was still hovering over parts of the city despite the best efforts of the morning sea breeze. The number of fires continued to grow. Firefighters were increasingly reluctant to enter dark buildings—if no coherent language replied to their hails, the new procedure was to allow buildings to burn. Entire blocks were being sacrificed as firebreaks. Joanna knew that her principal link to the police was ailing. Dominguez was becoming erratic. She’d happily supported the relocation of his family to the high-security building downtown and the greater protection afforded the kids there had stabilized him for a time. The building wouldn’t indefinitely be proof against the risks that they faced and her own small “family” was domiciled there as well. Nonetheless, Ding’s effectiveness was waning, and his focus was strictly on preparing for an evacuation.

  Her private cell rang and she picked up, only to have the call drop. She had recognized the number of her man Schweizer. His placement inside Bank of the Americas would be critical if the bank was going to renege on the deal, but so far Smith had entirely lived up to the bargain. Smith wasn’t just attractive, he was also an honorable man, a rarity in Kohn’s experience. Pity that he would have to go after things settled out. His traditional thinking and belief in the hierarchy, in “the world as it was” would eventually become a liability.

  Moments later the phone rang again and this time the connection to Schweizer held.

  “Ma’am. I have the complete personnel lists and bills of lading for all four refuge sites,” Schweizer said. His tone was flat and behind him she could hear the sounds of a busy operations center. “There are supply problems for two of the sites but the bank is working to get at least one more completed in the next two weeks. However, the consensus from the intel team is that we have less than a month before infrastructure drops below the threshold to sustain operations in at least two critical points of failure.”

  “Where does Smith think that the rupture will occur?” Knowing where the bank thought that the hammer would fall first was important to know when to jump.

  “Refined liquid fuels probably, but telecom is slipping.”

  He paused as someone in the background yelled: “Look at that shit!”

  “Things are getting pretty exciting over here. The NYSE, the NASDAQ and the Chicago Mercantile all followed the lead of the Hang Seng and Tokyo—trading applications have been adjusted so that tolerable latency has been doubled, despite error rates and associated costs. The long bond is negative—no one is willing to think long term. The overnight rate is also picking up an average of ten to twenty bips daily.”

  Bips, or basis points, were a more finely graduated scale that permitted bankers to subdivide rates more precisely. One hundred bips made up a single percentage point. Usually the rate was lower than that charged to commercial customers. Twenty bips on the overnight rate would have been considered a seismic event, pre-Plague.

  Kohn had no problem following her analyst’s report. The banks were charging each other more than an extra percent every week. Unsustainable.

  “Basically, what you are saying is that we are going probably going to run out of gas before we run out of money or the phones stop working, but it is going to be close?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Very well,” Joanna said crisply. “Keep me informed on any changes. Are we clear?”

  * * *

  “I want to be perfectly clear, Paul.”

  Smith had his intel chief and ops center coordinator’s full attention. Rune was trying for “dutiful and loyal subordinate” but he was worried that it just came across as “scared that I’m going to screw up” with a healthy dollop of “oh God please don’t put me in charge of her.” There was a little “intimidated as hell” in there too.

  “Mail,” Tom said, keeping it simple. “Not mail delivery and exploring. Most especially, not mail delivery and zombie hunting. Just. Mail. Above the third floor. Now, you know what I want to hear, right?” Smith was not going to allow for any parsing of his instructions.

  “Only mail duties for Ms. Smith,” Rune said. “No going downstairs or outside without escort. No getting into scrums with zombies. Check, Boss.”

  The subject of his concern was sitting in the same conference room. An oversize bandage covered her thumb and she was picking at the tape.

  “Uncle Tom, I told you like a million times that I didn’t just go zombie hunting. They were just there! All I was doing…” She stopped when she looked at her uncle. His normal “face,” at least in her experience, had changed.

  The benevolent and kind uncle that she had always known wasn’t there at the moment. The blond-haired and steely-eyed man who had taken his place was staring at her and it was a bit alarming. Tom Smith didn’t raise his voice and he didn’t threaten when he spoke, but there was an unpleasant energy in his gaze. It was a little uncomfortable, actually. She looked over at the dark-haired man in the room with them. Although he had answered her uncle’s “sort of” questions just as calmly as her uncle had asked them and was sitting normally, he still gave the impression of being ready to jump without warning and escape through the conference room door.

  “Faith Marie Smith, I can’t stop what I’m doing to watch your every move,” Tom said coldly. “I cannot second-guess a person who should already have the requisite maturity to do what she can to contribute to a very serious situation without creating a crisis. I won’t dedicate my top security staff to babysit…” His voice trailed off and his eyes slid towards Rune. “Not that they were successful the first time…”

  He refocused on Faith.

  “I need all the time that I can squeeze out of every day. Time to do things so important that it affects real lives, every hour. I can’t afford to worry about you in the interim. So, when I say that you are going to deliver mail and only deliver mail, I need to believe that you are going to do only that.”

  Faith stared at the stupid thumb bandage. She was rather annoyed by the injustice of it all. It wasn’t like she wanted to fight zombies. Well, fight that many at the same time. She looked up with a ready retort…and stopped. The “stranger” was still looking right at her. She slid her eyes right for a moment. Mr. Frozen wasn’t even breathing.

  Sigh.

  “Okay, Uncle Tom. Mail. Only mail. Check.”

  * * *

  “Moving this much gold is unnecessary, Rich,” Tom said. Smith didn’t appreciate the distraction and really preferred to be back at the bank. They each only had about a billion things to do and the bottom could drop at any moment.

  “Too massy to move, really hard to meaningfully damage, pretty much the definition of corrosionproof. The best choice is just pump the room full of cement and weld the door, then fill the stairway with more cement. Without the right tools, you would be a long time getting inside, assuming you get past the doors from the outside. And in the immediate aftermath the value of gold versus more important commodities is likely to be limited. We’d be better off moving this much volume, or mass, of medicines, ammunition or food. If we had this much medicine, ammunition or food available.”

  Bateman looked around the offsite bullion depository, located well away from Manhattan. The specially built facility was actually in the sub basement of a large, secure and unmarked data center about half an hour outside Manhattan. Standard gold bars, weighing a little over twelve kilos each, were stacked in short neat piles ten bricks high. The CEO looked around at the shin-high piles of gleaming metal that filled most of the medium sized room.

  “Can’t we stack them higher than this?” Rich asked, kicking a pile. “I actually agree and don’t want to move them, but we may need floor space here. I might have a chance to cut a deal with the Met, the Frick and the Guggenheim. They want safe storage for some of their more important items.” Bateman leaned down and actually hefted a single bar, making the Bank of the Americas guard twitch a little.

  “This depository can handle a load of up to five tons per square foot,” the facility manager said. “The issue isn’t the concrete
. The forklifts that we can fit inside have a ten-metric-ton lift limit. As it happens, stack those bars ten high across a single standard pallet and it weights just under ten tons. With that, we still have to use special pallets.”

  “Let’s not make our staff any more nervous than necessary, sir,” Tom said. He reached over and held his hand out for the bar that Bateman was holding. “Each stack is worth about half a billion, give or take.”

  “I see,” Bateman said with a grin, a rare enough sight recently. “I had to see this to understand, and I don’t mind being out of Manhattan for a little bit. Let’s look at that stack in the corner.” He led the way to the farther pile, several meters from the armed guard in BotA livery.

  “We are getting direct pressure from Treasury,” Bateman pitching his voice low. “They know about at least one of the refuges and they are asking unhelpfully detailed questions about capacity and equipment.”

  Tom Smith though through the implications, not just of the CEO’s statement, but of why he was talking about it here.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “New York,” his boss replied. “At least that one, maybe the others too. They could have gotten it from almost anyone in our staff, but if they only have the one, then the leak might be on the sell side of the real estate deal, the state deeds office, anywhere. At this juncture, the forensics are nearly pointless.”

  “Yeah, I can find a way to get more room down here,” Smith said just loud enough for it to carry. He kicked the pile of worthless metal and added for the other man’s ears, “I’m already moving staff by van to the refuges in small groups. As soon as we think we are within twenty-four hours of losing the roads or the cops, we stop operations and push everything that’s left all the way out, okay?”

  Bateman nodded.

  * * *

  The location of Fort Hamilton, on the coast of southern Brooklyn, was the place where optimistic colonial artillery had engaged elements of the English fleet on the fourth of July 1776. Although they succeeded in causing minor damage, the cannonade was largely symbolic, and the English went on to occupy Manhattan. During subsequent wars, and repeatedly over the years, the fort’s walls had been upgraded and the cannons up-gunned, right up until missiles made harbor defense moot. Then the developers had moved in and planted subdivisions on much of the original fort. The entrance gate to what was left of the last Army installation in New York City stood under the shadow of the Verranazo bridge. The atmosphere of the American inner city contrasted with the National Guard vehicles, weapons and uniforms, making Copley feel a little surreal as they rolled towards the fort’s main gate.