Suddenly, he heard a dull knock on the door to Natalie’s office.
“Come in,” he said loudly.
“Hi, Ted,” said the voice. A short, wiry man with curly black hair and thick glasses peeked his head in the door. Joshua Essinger ran KKB’s proprietary trading desk, overseeing eight traders who collectively managed a portfolio of more than $25 billion. Essinger’s desk invested money off the KKB balance sheet, buying securities across the energy complex, though mainly oil, natural gas, and electricity futures, a financial tool by which KKB was able to smooth out the peaks and valleys that were typical of an energy company whose value was, to a certain extent, dictated by not only the success or failure of exploration projects, but also by the whims of fluctuating commodity prices. Essinger was hired by KKB after a highly successful career as a commodities trader at Morgan Stanley.
“Josh, come in, sit down,” said Marks.
Essinger crossed the office and sat, somewhat delicately, on one of the leather couches.
“I have a question for you,” said Marks.
“Yes, sir. Name it.”
“If you knew about Savage Island ahead of time, about Capitana, how would you go about profiting from it?”
Essinger sat up, shocked for a brief moment. “Well, that’s an awkward sort of question—”
“I’m not saying you did it, Josh. I’m asking how you
would
do it.”
“Do you think someone actually did this? Profited from it? Wasn’t this an act of terrorism?”
“I don’t know what I think,” said Marks. He stepped from behind his desk, limped to the sofa across from Essinger, sat down.
“Okay, okay. No, I understand. Well, the obvious answer is I’d own a bunch of shorts against us, KKB and Anson.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
“But that’s not actually the best way. Problem is, you can only buy so many shorts. It’s just not a big pool. Sure, I could make some money, but the truth is, it’s capped. I’m thinking, depending on collars, limits, that sort of thing, you might have been able to make high nine figures, maybe a billion or two.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“Sounds like a lot, but not in context. Depends, of course, on how much I’m running, but let’s just assume it’s the billion we have in cash on the desk. With the kind of quantum devaluation that just occurred with both companies, if I knew about it ahead of time I should have been able to make, I’m thinking, north of ten billion. Ten-x just feels right. Maybe higher.”
“Right. But still, it’s the quickest—”
“Shorts are also too obvious, Ted. They’re not going to risk being on the money side of these shorts.”
“So how would you—”
“Simple. I buy the shit out of competitors. Name it, I’m buying it. Electricity stocks—ConEd, Entergy, Southern, Duke, et cetera—oil and gas stocks, BP, Exxon, Valero, Andarko, et cetera. I can run a regression on it, but I don’t need to. All those guys popped pretty hard in the past few days, since Savage and Capitana got leveled.”
“So, next question,” said Marks. “Can we look and see if someone did this? A company, a government, hedge fund?”
“Well, sure, we can try. It’ll be tough. There are myriad ways to cloak a trade. If I did what you said, I’m doing everything I can to hide my trades. Offshore funds named after similar legal entities, pass-throughs buying ADRs, then flipping them out. That said, there are ways. I’d look at patterns and I’d look at dollar volume relative to overall balance sheet. I
mean, Fidelity probably bought a billion worth of each of those stocks I mentioned in the days leading up to the attacks, but they’re running trillions and it’s being managed across dozens of energy-related entities, know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“Under any circumstance, the longer you wait, the harder it is to look back. You need to look right now.”
“And that’s because?”
“These guys are criminals, right? They’re smart. They understand they need to break away from the money. So right now they’re probably selling out of their positions. It won’t be easy to find them. Then they’ll wind down the legal entities that wired the money, cleared the trades. They’ll be gone soon.”
Marks sat back, nodded. He felt another sharp tear of pain in his palm. This one would not go away. He leaned forward, his eyes watering.
“I want you to look into it, Josh.”
“I will. How soon?”
“Now.”
“Now meaning today?”
“Now meaning thirty seconds after you walk out of this office. I need you to hit it hard, immediately.”
Essinger stood. “I’ll get on it right now.”
“I’ll call you from the road,” said Marks, standing up. “In the meantime, you find anything, you call me, Terry, or, if you don’t get us, Jessica Tanzer at the FBI. Here’s her number.” Marks handed Essinger a slip of paper.
“Where you going?”
“Panama.”
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Buck arrived at his desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, shut the door, took off his jacket, and threw it on one of the chairs in front of his desk. At his desk he keyed up one of the three computer screens.
Quickly, he keyed in a series of passwords and was suddenly at a screen that read:
He clicked on the hyperlink next to the word
video
then entered another password. Then, he entered that day’s date. He waited for the prompt, then entered a period of time: 7:00
A.M.
to 7:20
A.M.
After a few seconds, a live shot video suddenly appeared in color showing the front of his house in Alexandria. He sat back, sipped his coffee cup, and watched. There was no activity until 7:11
A.M.
Then, he watched as the image of himself on the screen suddenly appeared from just over an hour ago, leaving his home, first walking out the door, then, a minute later, his car backing out of the driveway.
Exactly twenty-four seconds after his sedan sped away, an image
appeared. A Ford Taurus station wagon, which slowed at his driveway, stopped for ten seconds, then sped off.
“Fuck,” he said to himself. He knew it was coming, but the confirmation stung. They had started the hunt.
Buck exited the system, then turned to the second computer screen. He again entered a series of passwords, moving through a succession of screens that were blank, save for the password entry boxes. Finally, at the fourth such screen, he paused.
Buck was now preparing to connect to the Internet through a system that had been put in place more than a decade ago, a “safe circuit” system designed by CIA technologists during the early phases of wireless encryption. These circuits enabled secure side routes through dial-up access points throughout the world, a low-tech but secure way to gain access to the Internet without the fear of signal and thus content theft. With the improvement in encryption methods, the CIA safe circuit system had long ago been shut down, except for one circuit that Buck himself had, as Kiev station chief, kept active, against orders. The actual circuit was the size of a penny, and was housed on a small telephone switch at the Hotel Budapest in downtown Kiev. No one at the hotel knew about it.
Buck entered the digits of a local Kiev phone number which he had long ago committed to memory. Suddenly, unbeknownst to any other human being in the world, he was online.
A black screen appeared with a small yellow dot, which Buck clicked twice. Russian words appeared.
He went to the customer log-in page, typed an account name and password, hit Enter. After a few moments, an account page appeared. It was the bank account of a man named Petr Dmitrov.
For more than fifteen years, Vic Buck had also been Petr Dmitrov. And Petr Dmitrov was very, very rich.
A smile crept across Buck’s lips as he read just how rich Petr Dmitrov in fact was.
The wire from Fortuna had already hit: $15,100,008.77.
Not bad for a kid from Fresno.
Buck had long ago learned to put aside any kind of guilt or moral quandary caused by his actions. He knew he was harming his country, that the blood of innocent Americans was on his hands. But it didn’t bother him. Unlike other turncoats and traitors whose stories he’d studied or knew so well, Victor Buck’s treason had no epic moment, no single event that pushed him to decide to betray his country. No, he knew his decision had been all about greed. He’d grown up poor, without a father, raised by a mother who worked so hard as a cleaning woman that she was dead before little Vic was even out of elementary school. His poverty was the fuel behind it all, the chip on his shoulder that had led him down this miserable path.
Now, as he looked at the account balance on the screen, Buck again asked himself whether he should leave the United States now and forgo the remaining payment. Fifteen million was a lot of money. But was it enough? Buck hoped to live a long life, lavishly, and protecting himself from the combined might of Alex Fortuna and the U.S. government would be costly.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.
Don’t fuck this up,
he thought.
You’re so close.
It had become exponentially more dangerous since the failure at Madradora. If they had just terminated Andreas, everyone would have assumed it was the terrorists, following him. But now, the failure demonstrated just the opposite; the ineluctable, indisputable fact that someone within U.S. interagency betrayed the exfiltration plan and set up Andreas for termination.
Buck felt his world quickly closing in. Yes, he could run, but he needed the money. He wouldn’t see it if he left now. But the longer he stayed, the more likely it was he would be found out. He felt his heart racing.
Calm the hell down.
Buck exited the screen and reached into the middle drawer of his desk, taking out a Valium, which he broke between his fingers. He popped half into his mouth. He dabbed at his forehead with a shirtsleeve. Despite the bitterly cold temperatures outside, he was sweating like a pig.
They were now in the part of the game where everything could go wrong with one false move, one bad decision.
And he knew they knew.
He’d been around enough mole hunts to know they had narrowed it down. Tanzer was the one. She knew. He saw it in her eyes. It had hit him the moment Jane Epstein told the group the Deltas were dead. Jessica hadn’t looked at him, and that was it. It was the way she’d willed herself to precisely not look at him, at that moment. A quick glance, then to Scalia. Assiduously avoiding his eye. Then the way she acted oh-so-casually, as if she didn’t know Andreas had narrowly escaped. As if he hadn’t called in. Yes, Jessica Tanzer knew. And unfortunately, she would also be the one running the hunt.
Buck thought quickly now. First things first. It wasn’t only Jessica Tanzer that he had to deal with. He also had to handle Dewey Andreas. He went to his third computer screen, clicked the interagency sheet. He scanned the names, contact numbers of everyone on the sheet. What he was looking for wasn’t there. He got up, walked to the sofa at the far side of his office, unbuckled his briefcase. He picked up a sheaf of papers. He found a sheet, the same interagency contact sheet, but a printout of it. At the bottom, in his own neat handwriting, he saw the name: Terry Savoy. His cell phone number. Savoy would have been the one who’d gotten the call from Andreas.
Buck went back to the first screen. He went into a simple CIA cell-trace database, entering his password. He came to a light blue screen, no writing. At the center of the screen, a rectangular box. He entered Savoy’s cell phone number. After a full minute, a long list of phone numbers appeared. He scanned the list quickly, finding mostly domestic numbers. Then, he saw a number that stood out. A phone call Savoy had received the day before, an international number, the exchange 537 in front of it.
Buck knew the exchange by heart. After all, he’d visited the country at least two dozen times during his long career.
Havana.
Clever choice, Cuba. Andreas couldn’t have chosen a better place to escape the influence of a U.S. government mole.
Next, Buck used a reverse directory to pinpoint the location of the call. The Parque Central. Buck sighed. He had stayed there himself.
Suddenly, his cell phone buzzed.
“Yeah,” he said.
“How was that?” asked Fortuna.
“Long Beach?” responded Buck. “Last count, there are more than two thousand people dead. I thought this was about infrastructure.”
“Does it hurt your tender conscience?” asked Fortuna. “You already sold your soul. You didn’t complain about hundreds dead when you cashed the first ten million. You won’t be saying anything when you’re lying on a beach somewhere. I’m striking economic targets. If I wanted to kill people there would be many, many more dead. But right now, there’s only one person you and I both
need
dead.”
“I know I’ll be in hell after all is said and done. But I’ll be several floors above where they put you.”
“Blah, blah, blah. You’re boring me.”
“You’re the devil,” said Buck.
“Then who is the guy who helped the devil?” asked Fortuna. “Is he better or worse?”
Buck rubbed his right temple, staring in front of him. A photo of his father and mother sat in a wooden frame.