The 13th Enumeration (14 page)

Grabbing his carry-on bag, he swung it at the officer and missed. He charged the next closest officer, yelling, “Allahu Akbar!” They collided, and he jumped the security cordon and ran down the terminal yelling and screaming like a madman.

Joe ran about a hundred feet. Another security officer stepped in front of him, his gun drawn, telling him to stop and get down on the floor. Joe charged right into a nine-millimeter lead bullet. The officer’s aim was true. The bullet glanced off his rib and went right through his heart.

Joe Douglas was dead.

Chapter 29

Manhattan, New York City

Throughout the early morning, the 911 switchboard began to receive more and more calls about smelly, oily water. It wasn’t until three-thirty a.m. that the 911 supervisor on duty decided to call his supervisor. Another thirty minutes later, his supervisor decided he’d better call the police department. Several calls and another hour later, he got ahold of a departmental captain who would listen, and the captain called his supervisor. Finally, at six a.m. Monday morning, the situation was officially raised to incident status.

By that time, Manhattan residents were waking up all over lower Manhattan and jumping in the shower. By
eight
a.m., diesel fuel was in every main water pipe in lower Manhattan and in every commercial building, most condos, and houses. It took another hour before the mayor authorized the complete shutdown of New York City’s water system and
three
more hours before that was accomplished by the New York Water Authority. Lower Manhattan did not yet know that its lifeblood was permanently poisoned. Most people take it for granted, but clean water is the life of any modern civilization. Without it, the mighty spiraling cities of the world could not exist. New Yorkers were going to learn this painful lesson over the next few days.

Because the authorities did not know exactly where the contaminated water had entered New York’s water system, they shut everything down. It took eight hours to determine that only lower Manhattan had been contaminated. By that time, the damage was done.

It was a Twitter post that started it. The wife of one of the terrorist-response team member’s tweeted to her friends that city officials believed the contamination to be a terrorist act. The rumor spread like wildfire, and thirty minutes later, it was all over the news. Without water, New Yorkers quickly realized the city was uninhabitable. By nine o’clock Monday morning, every street and highway out of Manhattan was bumper-to-bumper cars. By ten, New York City streets were one large inescapable parking garage. People left their cars and just started walking.

* * *

A professor from New York University was the first to notice the radioactive contamination of the water. He had been taking samples of Manhattan’s water every morning since the Fukishima disaster, testing the water to determine whether Fukishima radioactive material had reached the groundwater of New York. Monday morning, he opened his faucet and started to fill the sink. He noticed the oily film right away, but it wasn’t until he took a reading with his portable radiation particle detector that he knew something was wrong.

The professor emptied the sink, then ran the faucet for five more minutes, feeling slightly guilty for wasting the water. After five minutes, he again filled the sink with one inch of water. This time the reading was a little higher. Taking a clean container, he filled it with about half a gallon of tap water and left for the university. On the way, he noticed traffic was horrible. Since he had not turned on the radio or watched the news that morning, he did not know what was going on.

When he got to work and tested for specific radioactive particles, what he found made his hair stand up. There were actually trace amounts of plutonium in the water. Plutonium was considered a man-made element, although minute amounts had been found to occur in nature. The amounts in the tap water could only have come from a nuclear power plant. If plutonium was in the water supply, it was permanently contaminated.

The professor picked up the phone.

* * *

At ten a.m., the circulating pump in Joe’s condo turned on, and five minutes later the water heaters’ thermostat called for heat. Both gas control valves received the twenty-four-volt signals and opened, sending four-hundred-thousand BTUs worth of gas down the plastic tubing and out into the empty garage. By this time, all ten forced-air furnaces had kicked in and were sucking the garage air into the building’s ventilation system, along with the ever-increasing mixture of natural gas. Surprisingly, it took twenty-three minutes for the gas/air mixture to reach optimal combustibility. One of the furnace blower motors was on its way out, and it periodically sent out a little spark of electricity between its wiring and the motor housing. When it ignited the mixture, the resulting explosion ripped apart the condo and blew out the windows of all surrounding buildings. The explosion broke the three-inch gas main to the building, causing a tremendous torch of fire that ignited every piece of flammable material within fifty feet.

By this time every street in lower Manhattan was blocked with traffic, so the fire department could not respond to the fire. The flames finished what the explosion had left and then spread to the buildings on both sides of the condo. The two closest firehouses were twelve and sixteen blocks away, but they could not get their fire trucks out the door. Unwilling to just stand around watching their city burn, the firefighters grabbed their hoses and other equipment off the trucks and jogged down the street to the fire. Luckily for them, the order to shut down New York’s water system was still working its way through the bureaucracy. They still had
one and a half
hours before they lost access to water. Their herculean efforts subdued the fire in
one
hours and
twenty-five
minutes. Joe’s condo and three surrounding buildings were completely destroyed.

At eleven a.m., the mayor of New York City came on television and tried to calm everyone’s fears. He told New Yorkers that while they had only found contaminants in lower Manhattan’s water supply, as a precaution they
began to
shut down the entire water system of New York. All private and government employees, except emergency personnel, were told to stay home and not go to work. A market holiday was declared as of ten a.m. Eastern time, and all US exchanges were to remain closed until further notice.

*  *  *

Dylan was in his command center watching the world markets when he noticed a drop in the futures of the DOW and SP500. He searched several of his online news sources and saw no real news events that might cause the sharp declines. Turning to the financial news blog Zerohedge, he saw a story that had just been posted of possible contaminated water in New York City’s financial district. Just as he was reaching for the phone to call some of his contacts in New York, his phone rang. It was Darius.

“I just received word from some of my associates in New York. It appears there may have been another terrorist attack. At this time the details are still sketchy, but it seems the water system of the financial district has been polluted. Dylan, I want you to keep AQES as steady as a rock. No matter what happens, I want it to hold its current price plus or minus two dollars. Is that understood?”

“No problem,” replied Dylan. “I was able to sell those additional two billion shares over the last three days for an average of thirty-four dollars a share. Minus what we have transferred to our operating account, over the last couple of weeks, we have
raised
over a hundred-and-twenty-billion dollars in cash.”

“Well done, Dylan. Let’s wait and see how AQES reacts. If you have to step in, do so. When it looks like these events have reached a maximum point of fear—in relation to the markets, I mean—I want you to step in and buy as many future contracts on iron ore as you can get your hands on. I will also be e-mailing you a list of companies I want you to buy as many shares of as you can. When these events settle out, I want to be a major shareholder in each one. I will leave it to your discretion as how to go about this. You know how to play this game. Use all the money we have—only keep us five billion in cash reserves. Any questions?”

Dylan was silent for several seconds, trying to pull his incredulous thoughts together. “Just to make sure I understand you, Darius. Once I have stabilized AQES you want me to use up to one-hundred-and-fifteen-billion dollars to purchase iron ore and the stock of companies on the list you will be forwarding to me?”

“No, I don’t want you to use
up to
one-hundred-and-fifteen billion. I want you to use every last dollar of it. Have I made myself clear?”

Darius’s tone was frightening calm and serious. “Yes, perfectly clear,” Dylan replied. He could not help but give a half-nervous, half-excited laugh as he continued. “You know, it’s not every day someone tells you to spend every last cent of one-hundred-and-fifteen-billion dollars. This will be something to tell the grandchildren about, that’s for sure.”

“Make it happen, Dylan,” Darius said. Then he hung up the phone.

Dylan sat thinking about what Darius had told him to do. The futures on the DOW and SP500 were now down six percent. If this was a real terrorist attack, then it was likely market trading would be suspended for a day or two or longer depending on how serious it was. That would give him time to write some special algos for the specific stocks Darius wanted purchased. If he got his timing right, he would really be able to make Darius a lot of money. Heck, he had just sold fifty million of his own personal AQES shares at around twenty-five dollars a share. He had a billion dollars of his
own
money. If he piggybacked off Darius’s hundred-and-fifteen billion, he could make multiples on that as well. They couldn’t have asked for a better setup, even if Darius had planned it himself.

Chapter 30

Phoenix, Arizona

Like most of America, Sam was glued to his television. The news reports coming out of New York were disturbing. There were no reported deaths due to the contamination of Manhattan’s water system, but according to various experts who were being interviewed, it would be extremely hard if not impossible to remove the diesel fuel contamination from the pipes. When news broke of possible plutonium contamination, everyone who could decided to leave Manhattan.

Sam picked up the phone and dialed David’s cell phone. On the third ring David picked up.

“David, what’s going on there? Is it as bad as they’re saying on the news?”

“Sam, I really can’t give you any specifics from my end, but from what I’ve seen of the news reports, they are pretty accurate. By the way, your report on Anaj was kicked upstairs. After today’s events, I think we’ll be able to get a subpoena for Google. I’ve got to go—as you can imagine, things are hectic right now. I’ll be in touch.”

* * *

A week later trading resumed, but not out of New York. All trading was being routed through the Chicago exchanges. Now Dylan had a front-row seat as far as the data feeds went. With New York offline, there was no one faster than him. His algos would eat up and spit out anyone who tried to mess with AQES stock. He now also had top bandwidth for his purchase of the iron ore mining, fabrication, and pipeline companies.

Today, with trading on the US exchanges resuming, it looked like the US markets were going to open twenty percent down. There was a lot of fear out there. He would just watch for a few days before he made his move. When he did get in the game, he would start by buying options on every stock on Darius’s list. If he could time his purchases close to the point when the market fear was almost exhausted, he might be able to turn things around. Or at least get credit for it.

The aftermath of events in New York City had the world mesmerized. Manhattan Island was a ghost city. Without water it might as well have been the Sahara Desert. It took five days to completely evacuate Manhattan, and emergency personnel said it was the smell that was hardest to deal with. Without running water, the waste could not be disposed of, and every building and alleyway reeked of it. The smart ones watching the tragic drama unfold from their own concrete jungles realized just how dependent they were on those things they almost always took for granted. In a moment of stark clarity, many realized that in an emergency, they could not depend on the government to bail them out. Many sat down at their kitchen tables and drew up lists of things they would need if a similar situation occurred in their city. Others decided they needed to move to a more rural setting to provide the security they thought they needed for their families. On balance, it was a needed wake-up call for many Americans.
 

* * *

In Tel Aviv, Efran Finkelstein once again sat at the computer and downloaded a picture from his junk mail folder. This time the picture was an advertisement for Russian women looking for husbands in the West. Efran looked at the picture and shook his head. He doubted any of the Russian women looking for husbands at that agency were like the woman in that picture. She almost made him want to get married again. No, he thought to himself. No woman was that pretty.

Efran pasted the picture into the Anaj encryption software, and a new message appeared on the screen. The message told him to mark the outside of all future messages with the number thirteen. That was strange. They had never before requested that messages be marked. The only thing he could think of was that they needed to be able to identify his capsules specifically. Could that mean someone was especially interested in the Capernaum dig? This might mean a bigger payoff if he could find something of value to skim when no one was looking. “When no one is looking,” he muttered to himself in disgust. With the Neumann girl on the dig, he would not have much chance of that.

Efran naturally hated those who had something he wanted but was not able or willing to achieve. Rachael, he knew, did not trust him. That made her an enemy. It would be difficult if not impossible to acquire any dig artifacts for his contact while she was watching. He really needed to find that one opportunity which would set him up for life. Being in charge of the Capernaum dig might offer him that opportunity
if
he could escape her ever-watchful eyes. Well, if the opportunity presented itself, he was going to do his best to take it. He could not live the lifestyle he deserved on what he made at this job.

Typing out an acknowledgment of the new instructions and a brief summary of the Capernaum dig, he encrypted the file on a fresh flash drive. Getting up from his computer, he walked over to the cabinet and removed the necessary supplies to make his little sewer submarine. A few hours later he sent the lead-encased message marked with the number thirteen on its dirty journey to the sewer underworld.