59
Monday
T
HE NIGHT WAS humid and close. Heat lightning flickered occasionally, faint skyborne reflections of the neon clamor. Kissimmee was alive with a crowd that either could not afford or had no interest in the Disney world order. Eric sat in a rental car, far to one corner of the bar’s parking lot. Just being there caused the gradually healing welt on his forehead to throb.
Once more the bevy of cars were parked in the handicapped zone, five of them this time, including a showstopping Lamborghini Diablo and a Mercedes 500 SEL custom convertible. Eric had come prepared for a long wait. There was no telling when the traders would emerge, probably not for hours. They had been forced to forgo the Forex convention. Like his own colleagues, they were probably determined to party with violent abandon. Eric understood them with an insider’s bitter wisdom. These traders would get off on the bar’s edgy danger, especially as they had bought themselves a measure of safety. They impressed the girls with their hundred dollar tips and tasted the peril like just another drug. They were a macho crowd. Almost all traders were. The floor’s tension was an impossible opiate. They required somewhere loud and close to the edge to forget, even for a few hours.
Traffic along the eight-lane Highway 50 had thinned out and the clock’s dial had lost all meaning by the time the traders finally straggled out. Eric watched them play the doorman like a muscle-bound joker. He saw the tension in the bouncer’s shoulders, observed the clenched way he pulled his face into a smile when they handed him a two hundred dollar tip. The dregs of Eric’s thermos were bitter with memories of his own similar stupidities.
He followed them along the strip. They were flying now, revving engines at the stoplights, shouting and calling back and forth between cars. Two ladies they had picked up at the joint displayed the stoic boredom of women who had seen all there was to infantile behavior. One of the cars peeled off and headed back toward Orlando. Eric decided to follow the others.
They pulled into a Denny’s and made a clamorous entry. At least most of them did. One head remained visible in the back of the open-top Mercedes.
Eric waited until he could see the traders causing mayhem in the restaurant before cautiously approaching the car. The top remained down. The guy in the back was a total stranger and snoring gently. Heart in his mouth, Eric slipped his hand into the guy’s jacket. Nothing on the first side. He held his breath and reached over, peeling back the other lapel. The wallet slipped out easily. He raced back to his car.
The problem with long computer entry codes was that they were almost impossible to remember. Especially now that they were changed every quarter. Hayek’s system also denied code holders the privilege to personalize access. Some versions used fourteen-digit strings but were capable of being rewritten within six hours of every quarterly change. But Hayek’s security program was not so flexible, which meant most people kept a written reminder close at hand.
Eric found the slip of paper sandwiched between two credit cards. He copied down the string of letters and numbers, then replaced the paper back into the wallet. He rose from his car and checked the parking lot. His blood congealed and his heart entered overdrive when he realized the guy’s head was no longer visible.
Eric sprinted back to the Mercedes. The car was empty. Crouching low, he moved closer to the glass front wall, and searched the inside of the restaurant. He wasn’t absolutely certain, but he didn’t think the guy was among the traders carousing at the tables.
Eric spent frantic minutes searching the lot. Nothing. He crawled back to the Mercedes just to be certain the guy had not somehow reappeared. Empty.
Keeping at least one car between him and the windows, he slipped around to the entrance. The gray-haired woman on cash-register duty started to greet him, when from inside the restaurant there came a crash of dishes, and a great shout of laughter. Grimly she slipped her key from the register and hurried back. “Wait right here, please.”
Eric hustled toward the washroom and pushed through the door. The guy from the convertible eyed him blearily and slurred, “Don’t feel so hot either?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re all bent over.” The guy rolled his forehead against the ceramic tile. “Where’d the music go?”
“Here, try washing your face. That always works for me.” Eric eased the guy toward the sink, slipping the wallet back in the process. He turned on the cold water and stepped back.
“Can’t focus ’thout the music.” The guy splashed his face, then raised his head and stared into the mirror. “Do I know you?”
“Not a chance.”
“You look like somebody.” He gave a bleary grin. “Sure. You’re all banged up.”
“Slipped in the bathtub.”
“Nah, it’s something else.” Doused himself a second time. “Give me a second.”
“Sorry, wrong guy.” Then the outer door squeaked. Eric took another step backward, entered a cubicle, and shut the door. Heard the new voice say, “Tony, hey, what are you doing in here?”
“There’s somebody in there, I know him.”
“Forget it, man, he’s not one of us.” The voice was familiar. Not shouting, but Eric knew it instantly as the guy who had sicced the bouncer on him. The trader Colin had attacked. Brant somebody. Eric crouched lower and heard, “Look at you, man, you’re a mess.”
“But I was talking with somebody.”
“Forget him, I tell you.” There was the sound of towels being pulled out of the container. “Here, dry yourself off. Okay, good, now let’s go join the party.”
“Is the music gonna start again?”
The guy barked a hard laugh. “Sure man, sure. I’ll have one of the little darlings sing you a song. You’ll like that.” The door closed.
Eric waited through three tight breaths, then slipped out and raced into the night.
60
Monday
E
VENING’S APPROACH FOUND Jackie wondering if perhaps the search of her old university books was merely a quest for fables. Eric’s silence only compounded the lack of solutions. And she missed Wynn. The fact that she was even admitting to such an emotion left her battered by all that might still happen.
She carried her laptop out into the darkness and softly closed the balcony door behind her. An earlier rain had cleared, leaving the air warm and windless and filled with the chorale of tropical springtime. The surrounding Florida oaks were twisted Chinese etchings upon a wash of stars and moonlight. Jackie turned her chair so that she was staring out over the treetops toward the north. All evening she had heard hints of churchbells fading into the distance. Now she sat and sipped at her mug and mourned how time and distance were already blurring her Roman memories. The questions she had asked herself in Rome and the faint awakenings of new hope were too fine to let slip away. She flipped open the cover of her laptop and began a new file. One she simply called
Essential
.
She stopped only when fatigue stripped her words of meaning. The wind rose with the night, whispering in the language of trees and nightbirds that such thoughts were too vital to be addressed with a sleepy heart. She closed the laptop, stretched, and felt as good about the hour as she had in a long time. She was not finished. In fact, she had scarcely begun. But admitting there was reason enough to remember, and to question, was the biggest step she had taken in years.
J
ACKIE WAS SO dead asleep, she thought at first the sound came from thunder. Then the house trembled about her, and once again she was faced with a fear she could not handle. Terror tossed her from her bed and slammed her into the side wall with the accuracy of a catapult. She tumbled to the floor and landed hard on something plastic, cracking it into shreds. She shook the stars from her eyes and crawled to her kitchen, where she pulled a drawer down on top of her, making all the noise of a construction site in full swing. Which left her no choice but to scream, “I’ve got a gun!”
“Stop, hey, no!” The shadow silhouetted against the dawn screamed almost as loud and certainly as high as she had. “It’s me!”
“Eric?” She managed to scramble over close enough to see the young-old features through her screen door. Relief surged into an anger so strong she could have stabbed him through the wire. “Do you have any idea how you just scared me?”
“Join the club. Put down that knife, will you? And let me in.”
Her fingers made hard going of the hook. “You’ve got it?”
“Where’s the letter from Shane?”
“Wait a second.” She turned on the light, walked back to her desk, and pulled out the envelope from beneath her laptop. On the floor by the alcove she saw the shards of what had formerly been her cellphone. “You really have the code?”
“Put down that knife, okay? Yeah, I’ve got it.” He flapped open a sheet of paper, his features bloodless. “But this is it, right? No more contacts, no changing your mind. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“Yes.” She made the exchange. Studied the scant notations. “This is all I need?”
“Long as you know what you’re doing.” He opened the envelope, gave it a quick read, and said bitterly, “If the drunk remembers me or that other guy puts two and two together, I’m dead meat.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind. What’s important is I don’t have to see you again. Am I right?”
“Far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
“You won’t tell Hayek?”
“Not a word.”
“Right.” He started toward the door, then added, “The numbers may be coded. You know, the first three digits one number forward, the next three back. That’s what I do. And be careful when you access the computer, it may have a silent alarm that goes off if the wrong codes are put in. We had a guy use the previous quarter’s code once. Security swarmed.”
Jackie followed Eric outside, watched him tumble down the stairs and hurry away. She lowered herself onto the top step, massaging the place on her forehead where she had slammed into the wall. Like it or not, she needed to find herself a bolt-hole. A few more terror attacks like this and there wouldn’t be anything left for Hayek to mangle.
61
Tuesday
T
HE NEXT MORNING, Colin arrived at Hayek’s headquarters two hours earlier than normal. Vague desires and shattered dreams had chased him from his apartment and driven with him down gray and empty lanes. He sat in the parking lot and yearned for a world he had only known within Lisa’s gaze.
The day had begun on a miserable note. Unable to sleep, he had done his regular scan of Havilland’s files just before six, only to find himself assaulted from the most unexpected direction. Fury had launched him from his chair, leaving him pulling his hair and shouting silent epitaphs against Havilland, against Lisa, against this benighted place and time.
Jackie Havilland had opened a new file called
Essentials
. It was as if Lisa had reached across space and time to strike a final blow. Somehow Jackie Havilland had arrived at the same point as Lisa and begun to ask the same questions. He could not shrug this off as mere coincidence. The enigma could not be so comfortably dismissed. Fate’s blind hand could not simply have plucked two such unlikely people and hurled them into the darkness, only to have them
both
come to the same conclusion. Colin had stared at the pilfered words on his screen and found pure agony in Jackie Havilland’s desperate wish to hold this same impossible vision.
Now as he walked through the overcast dawn, he yearned not for whispers but the voice of a woman who once had spoken to him of timeless love. A voice so melodious it had merely to breathe into his ear for him to hear the chant of ages and music from the stars. Her absence left him confronted by his own emptiness in all its skeletal horror.
He was almost relieved to enter the front office and be confronted by a day already running at hypertense speed. Alex and the barrel-chested derivatives trader stood by the reception desk, talking with a gray-suited man Colin had never seen before. Every seat in the foyer was taken by senior traders. All eyes were on him. Tight gazes, tense features. Faces from the floor.
Alex waved him over. “Want you to meet Thorson Fines. Chief of the Capital Markets division over at First Florida. This is our resident e-guru, Colin Ready.”
Without looking over, Thorson gave him the sort of onetime up-and-down handshake traders reserved for people not of their tribe, and thus below their contempt. “Right.”
Alex kept him there because Fines wanted him gone. “We all got calls from the pickle woman. You know who I mean?”
Colin nodded. Hayek’s secretary.
“She woke us up at a quarter to five. Wasn’t it about then, Barry?”
“You got me,” the derivatives man replied, eyeing Fines as he would a fish dead far too long. “All I know is, the phone sounded like the gong of doom.”
Fines spoke up then. “What, we’re filling in the backroom gophers now? Letting them know we’re here on what I was told is highly confidential business?”
“Miss Prunella sounded like she’d been at her desk for hours.” Alex ignored Fines’ comment entirely. “The lady probably mainlines coffee at midnight, just keeps chugging along. She goes, ’Mr. Hayek will see you promptly at half-past six. Be ready.’ As if I always go upstairs with my pants at half-mast. Ready for what, I ask her. But the old dear had already plunked down the phone.”
Barry said to Colin, “Alex told us about your set-to in the parking lot last night.”
“The kid here saved my bacon,” Alex confirmed. “Got to see if I can’t work up a special bonus.”
“That’s really not necessary.”
Barry asked, “Did the lizard lady call you as well?”
“No.”
“So what gives, you always show up this early?”
But the elevator doors opened then, and Hayek’s secretary announced, “This way, if you would please.”
Colin waited until the senior traders had filed obediently inside, then proceeded back through the trading room. A number of traders, no doubt alerted by their bosses, were already at their desks. They worked the screens and checked contacts in the Far East, where the markets had long been open. They shouted worldwide positions to allies at various stations about the floor. Already the entire building held the charged atmosphere of a day brought to the heated brink of storm and kept there far too long. The air was so filled with frenetic particles Colin felt ready to gnaw off his own limb, if only he could determine which one held him chained to this place.
Alex stopped by Colin’s cubicle about fifteen minutes later. “Hayek heard about the attack in the parking lot. He wanted to make sure everything was still attached and in working order.”
“That’s why he called you in?”
“Partly. Also wanted to have us meet with Thorson as one of the clan. You understand?”
“All one big family.”
“A family swimming in cash. We’re getting another two billion today. Maybe more. Hayek makes the announcement like a king bestowing favors. Like the cash is all his.”
“He wants you to buy more dollars?”
“My guess is, he’s stoking up the market. But for what reason, I can’t figure out. If we get hit by bad news, the dollar’s so high investors will flee like lemmings and the markets will crash right through the floor.” Alex was sheet-white with the coming strain. “When I mentioned the possibility, the guy actually laughed. It creaked from disuse.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“How about a little backdoor op? Could you sneak into the glass cage upstairs and see what they’re doing? Hayek kept Thorson in there after we were shown out. I tried to hang around upstairs, but Miss Prunella sent me packing.”
“You want me to slip into their network,” Colin interpreted. “And see if they’re buying dollars like you are.”
“Can you?”
“Not directly. But maybe I could tap into the outgoing call system, see who they’re talking to. Give you some numbers for you to call yourself.”
Alex nodded grim approval. “They got a name for that?”
“Sure. It’s called phreaking.”
“A couple of contacts will do. Just enough to make sure we’re all working for the same team. Don’t hang around long enough for them to get a line on you.”
Colin was already moving, keying in, prepping the attack order. “Give me half an hour.”
Forty-five minutes later, Colin passed through the rear trading floor door and entered a maelstrom. A shouting, screaming delirium. There were no individual voices, no clear words. None. Just one great solid howl.
Each trader held two phones and raged into mikes. Senior traders, unable to make themselves heard over the younger, louder voices made do with hand signals. Squawk boxes were turned on full, and the brokers were raging back at them. On the wall to Colin’s right, the Bloomberg wire streamed fiery gold letters across a red-tide background.
He spotted Alex in the middle of the spots arena, pointing and chopping in six directions at once. Colin waited and hoped for a calm moment, but he was seeking sunshine in a tornado of cash.
Colin moved over to where Eric sat watching his screens and chewing his pen. Up close, the cut splitting Eric’s eyebrow ran a red crease down his cheek and ended with the healing tear above his lip. The young trader emitted a tension that all the nonchalance in the world could not mask. His gaze skittered across the trading floor, the screens, the glassed-in balcony overhead. Colin asked him, “You’ve been sidelined?”
“Alex has me on euros to yen. Bottom of the day’s feeding barrel. Look at them out there. I’m missing all the fun.”
Colin had to shout to be heard. “So what’s happening?”
“Dollar’s flying, ready for a fall. Up two cents since the opening bell.” He drew out his pen and inspected it for defects. “Poor old dollar.”
Colin started to move on but had to fend his way around a trio screaming in midaisle. Alex moved up from the aisle’s other end, shoved them apart, and shouted loud enough to semidull the frenzy in three sets of red-rimmed eyes. “You duke it out on your own time! Right now I want a price. Dollars to anything! Any price! Now move!”
When they swung back into position, he drew Colin over with a jerk of his head. “What have you got?”
“Nothing. I’ve got nothing.” Colin hated having to admit defeat. “I tried every avenue I could. They’ve got the entire system blocked up tight as FEMA.”
“They didn’t catch you.”
“No. I was careful.”
Alex was talking loud, but the surrounding din swallowed his words almost before they reached Colin’s ear. “I did some calling of my own. The guys upstairs are buying as well. But take a careful look.”
Colin did so. Things were busy, but not chaotic. There was time for an occasional glance down below. He stiffened as he caught sight of the blond deadhead, the one who had planted a surveillance bug in his cubicle.
Alex scowled up at them. “Like vultures waiting for the kill.”
T
HE CALL FROM the trading floor was so frantic Colin could not understand the problem, merely the urgent need. That it came at all was both good and bad. Good because it gave him the chance to rescue Eric. Bad because it started the clock ticking down to his own personal destruction.
He and another backroom techie made a frenzied effort to discover why the floor had suddenly lost contact with Bloomberg. The wire service was a key source, running approximately a half hour ahead of television news. The electronic read-board ran across the upper left wall, visible from every trading station. Anytime there was a significant development, the wire ran what was called a blast message, alerting the traders to breaking data. At least, that was the principle. In reality, multiple pages of information poured in constantly from the Bloomberg wire, from the television monitors tuned to the twenty-four-hour news services, from the phones, from the data passing across traders’ screens, or shouted from one desk to another. The trading floor consistently ran one step ahead of data meltdown.
The junior techie held Colin’s ladder and handed up tools as he refitted the jacks, which had somehow been yanked completely free. The floor gave him a raucous cheer as the news began racing again at normal speed. Alex then turned on the hoot’n’holler, the PA system that broadcast to the entire floor, and said what he did about that time every day, “All right, listen up, gang. Let’s take a moment for the midmorning catch-up.”
Colin tuned out the summary of currency positions and interest-rate spreads, followed by Alex’s slant on what effect the current news would have on later-day positions. But every trader on the floor took careful notes, their attention focused on incoming ammo.
From his position on the ladder, Colin was the only person on the floor to spot the four faces moving to the balcony’s glass wall.
One face belonged to the deadhead, Brant Anker, minus shades. Another trader stood to one side. Jim Burke, the Unabomber, stood beside the mystery trader. To the deadhead’s other side was the senior security man, Dale Crawford. The unknown trader was pointing down at the floor and talking volubly. The security chief said something in response. Another security guard moved up alongside Crawford. All attention was focused upon one desk on the trading floor. Colin did not need to turn around to know what they saw.
Colin took it easy climbing down the ladder, not wishing to draw attention his way. He handed his tools to the other techie and said as calmly as he could manage, “Clear this up, will you. I’ve got something else to see to.”
He strolled down the back aisle, taking it slow, ignoring the gradually re-amping noise from the floor. Eric did not look up at his approach. Colin used his body to block his motion from the balcony, as he jammed his thumb hard into Eric’s side.
“Hey!” The guy turned around, to all the world just another trader whose world had narrowed down to four screens and three telephones. But the welt was still there on his forehead, the lip still bruised, the shadow ghosts still in his gaze. “What the—”
“Run,” Colin said, notching his head a fraction toward the balcony. “Now.”
Colin strolled over to the back door, then turned and shouted a silent scourge upon all the day. Eric still sat at his desk. The young trader stared dumbly at Colin. Colin glanced up and saw that the balcony was empty. He said to Eric and the enveloping chaos, “Worse and very much worse still.”
Then he flew.
Had he more time to think things over, perhaps he would have done nothing at all. Just let Eric be trapped and flayed and tied to the sacrificial altar. But there was no time for anything then except action.
Colin raced back to his cubicle. He flipped open his box of auxilliary gear and set up an emergency firewall. Two rotating electronic eyes the size of matchboxes were perched on the cubicle’s walls, angled so they monitored the aisles, the back passage, and the door to the trading floor. On his four monitors he threw up patterns designed for this very purpose, numbers and code in haphazard scrambles that would appear to the unknowing eye as work-in-progress.
Colin yanked out the fastest computer from beneath his desk and plugged in the latest of his acquisitions, a gift from a contact on the hardware side. The salesman had passed over top-of-the-line experimental gear in hopes that Colin would put in a good word when they next upgraded the floor. The new heads-up display looked like the bug-eyed sunglasses worn by the San Francisco deadhead. The heads-up was made for 3-D gaming. But the eye-level monitors were so finely calibrated he could read script. He coded in the entry pattern for slipping inside the company’s maintenance computer. Then he overrode the security camera system and spied in on the trading floor. He cursed softly when the first thing he saw was Dale Crawford and another security guy entering the trading floor with Jim Burke.
Colin observed helplessly as they came at Eric from two sides, cutting off his escape. Eric watched their approach in helpless horror. Only when the security chief gripped him by the shoulder did he start screaming. The camera caught the open mouth, the terror-stricken eyes, the way Eric clutched at his chair, the desk, his neighbor. They ripped his hands away and dragged him across the floor. Burke shouted something, the words lost to Colin’s silent vision. The other traders remained static, inert.