The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (27 page)

“Gentlemen!” Hummels screamed. “Gentlemen!” But no one listened. Hummels could feel the tears welling up in her eyes, but she knew, instinctively, that tears would make the men in the room only crazier—tears would be like blood in the water for hungry sharks. Instead, she grabbed the crystal water decanter on the table in front of her, raised it into the air in one swift motion, then brought it down with a crash onto the conference table. The glass shattered with a sharp boom, sending shards and water and ice cubes everywhere.

Everyone in the room froze and fell quiet. Franklin, who had bellied up to Lattimore, stepped back and stared at Hummels, amazement on his face. Lattimore reached down and brushed a sprinkling of glass from his jacket. Water ran off the table and onto the carpet below in dribbling streams.

“Holy shit,” Lattimore whispered.

Hummels looked them all in the eye, one by one, her breathing coming in jagged gulps. “This is not a schoolyard, and we are not children. We are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and we will comport ourselves with the respect that the office demands. We are adults, and we serve the people of this country, at the pleasure of the president. Do not forget that.”

She turned to Lattimore and Franklin. “Gentlemen, return to your seats.”

Lattimore sat immediately, looking spooked, but Franklin lingered at the edge of the table, a flash of defiance still in his eyes.

“Larry”—Hummels’s voice cracked—“sit the fuck down or I will call the bank police and have you removed from the room. And then I will urge the president to have you removed from the board. Permanently.”

Franklin opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to think better of it and returned to his seat.

Hummels took another breath, feeling her strength and power slowly returning. “Now”—her voice leveled out—“I believe Congress needs to make available emergency funds to backstop any institutions—banks or brokerage houses or insurance companies—that are facing imminent risk of collapse. To that end I have asked Leonard Harris, chairman of the House Banking Subcommittee, to join us for the remainder of—”

“Madam Chairwoman,” a voice interrupted weakly.

Hummels turned in surprise, a low fury showing on her face. Adelaide was sitting behind her and to her left, her face already reddening. “Adelaide, I am in the middle of—”

“Congressman Harris—”

“—speaking to the board and I will not be—”

“—has disappeared,” Adelaide managed to squeak out.

Hummels stared at her assistant in bewilderment.

“I’ve checked everywhere. Nobody knows where he is. He’s AWOL. Didn’t leave word with anyone. Anywhere.”

“I spoke to him last night,” Hummels said. “He said he would be here.” She felt a rising panic: Harris was the key to getting Congress to authorize money in a crisis. Without his leadership, the process would take days. Weeks, maybe. Months, even. Or it wouldn’t happen at all.

Her assistant shook her head vigorously, from side to side, and as she did
she held her smartphone above the table to show it to Hummels. “There’s something else.” Adelaide tapped the phone and a news app popped up onto the screen. “A truck just blew up on the George Washington Bridge. All traffic has been stopped going in and out of the city. It’s chaos.”

The room gasped collectively. Hummels could feel her knees quiver, and suddenly Lattimore was yelling again, and Franklin was back on his feet, and Chen and Cohen were both pointing at Hummels, their faces alive with anxiety. The boardroom was engulfed in noise. Adelaide looked at Hummels as the room descended back into a frenzy and said quietly, underneath the screaming, her eyes wide with fear, “What is going on?”

Caroline Hummels, newly appointed chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America, shook her head. “I have no idea.”

FBI F
IELD
O
FFICE
, L
OWER
M
ANHATTAN
, J
UNE
24, 4:15 P.M.

G
arrett saw the first reports of the accident on Twitter, with follow-ups coming fast and furious from online news sites. A truck had jackknifed on the upper level of the GW Bridge, and its fuel tanks had exploded, burning the entire vehicle and its unknown cargo in the middle of the roadway. Rescue workers and firemen hadn’t been able to get past the flames yet, so the body count was unknown, but the assumption was that the driver of the truck had been killed. Reports from witnesses said they thought two people had fled the vehicle and walked the span of the bridge east, into Manhattan.

The bridge was sealed off. Traffic in and out of Manhattan had come to a standstill at all tunnels and other bridges. The anxiety that had gripped the city in the morning was becoming an explosion of panic, and it was amazing to witness. To judge from the media, Armageddon was nigh. Anything might happen next—bombs, shootings, hurricanes.
Anything.
The entire island of Manhattan might sink into the Atlantic.

Garrett watched it unfold in astonishment. He noticed that he felt flashes of pleasure at the sight of all that chaos. An angry little boy was still inside his head, a boy who took great joy in throwing things and breaking things and smashing the world into tiny bits. He wondered if Ilya Markov had a similar boy inside his brain. Garrett suspected that Ilya did. The link between the two of them was growing in Garrett’s mind, the pattern of their relationship twisting together like the fibrous strands of a rope, becoming more and more tangled, more and more complicated. Garrett wondered if Markov, out there
somewhere, could feel it as well. He wondered how Markov felt about him. He wondered and was scared.

Chaudry monitored the proceedings by calling agents in the field, and Alexis did the same, but in her case she called Washington, DC. They both yelled out periodic updates to the room, one-upping each other in what they had gleaned from their sources. Garrett thought it was amusing that the two of them were having some kind of bureaucratic intelligence showdown—who could master the data world faster and better. Of course, Garrett had more information at his fingertips than either of them, but he wasn’t going to say anything. He had another thought—maybe the two of them weren’t tussling over power. Perhaps they were fighting over him.

Garrett thought that would be amusing as well, if it were true, but he suspected it was more personal fantasy than objective reality, and he didn’t have time to analyze the idea deeply. He and the rest of the team were too busy sorting through the crowdsourced answers that they had asked for on the Web. The results had been informative—inspiring even—as well as occasionally idiotic. More than 160,000 responses were on Reddit alone, with another 25,000 appearing on the hastily constructed website that Mitty had launched three hours earlier.

“I’m getting a lot of ‘assassinate the president’ ideas,” Mitty called out from her computer.

“Same,” Patmore said. “And ‘bomb Congress.’ ”

“Discard them,” Garrett said. “Out of hand. As well as anything else that falls too far outside the bell curve of the probability density function. It has to be doable.”

Celeste called out to the group, “There’s a lot of bank-related hits. Trying to make a bank run happen.”

“But how do you do that?” Garrett asked.

Celeste scrolled through her screen. “Twenty-five percent mention the ATM hack.”

“Original,” Garrett said. “Given that it’s already happened.”

“Fourteen percent say shoot the bank CEO. Seven percent say start rumors about collapse.”

Bingo called out from his laptop, “I get twenty percent suggesting we devalue the American dollar.”

“They give any suggestions on how to do that?” Garrett said. “Because I could make a shitload of money with that information.”

It became clear right away that exploding a truck in the middle of the George Washington Bridge was not an original idea: 6,447 other people had thought enough of the idea to post it online. That was an encouraging sign; it meant they were on the right track. Garrett began to see something, a slender reed of a pattern, a line of reasoning that kept cropping up from the most technical postings, the people who seemed to understand the finance business better than any of the others. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself, but then realized that was the beauty of crowdsourcing: you didn’t have to think of everything. Others were there to do the work for you.

For a moment, the IPO stock Crowd Analytics flashed into his thoughts. Had there been more movement on that equity? Had the money in the dark pool struck again? He checked it and found that the stock had moved in lockstep with the broader market, and that direction was down, but not independently down. But the idea spun in his head: How was Crowd Analytics involved? He went back to Reddit. People who seemed to know finance kept pointing to one institution, and one person, and it wasn’t Crowd Analytics. In their minds, power and size were not a good thing: they were the opposite. They were a vulnerability, and Garrett agreed.

“I think I know what he’s going to do,” Garrett said.

“Okay, tell me,” Chaudry said quickly. “If we’re going to plan an action, I need to know now. The field office is stretched thin. Almost every agent is out in the field.”

“Not you.” Garrett shook his head. “You’re not the one who needs to know.”

“I absolutely need to know,” Chaudry said, louder. She shot a look to Alexis, who started across the room toward Garrett.

“Too big to fail,” Garrett said. “We tell the man who’s too big to fail.”

• • •

Robert Andrew Wells Jr., the president and CEO of Vanderbilt Frink, called his wife from the office, told her to pack a bag for herself, one for him, and two for the kids. He told her to pack up as much nonperishable food from the cupboards as she thought would fit in the back of their town car, and when she asked him why, he said it was “to be on the safe side.”

“Is this about the truck crash on the bridge? And the food riots?”

“No. Well, maybe. Just a precaution. And there’s no food riots. Just people overreacting. Either way, I just would prefer to have you guys at the country house. I’ve arranged for a helicopter at the Thirty-Fourth Street heliport. I’ll try to make it out by the end of the day. Maybe tomorrow morning.”

Wells had seven acres of land on the beach in the Hamptons, with a sprawling house and garage, tucked away from the main road and fenced for extra security. When he and his family stayed there, Wells contracted a private security firm to protect the grounds, figuring you could never be too careful when you were as rich as he was.

He hung up with his wife and made final preparations for the press conference. It was lights-on in half an hour. His staff had already drawn up a statement on the current stability of Vanderbilt Frink, and a list of talking points for any gotcha questions the journalists shouted. He would try to project confidence and calm and give off an aura of future prosperity, but he knew the media would jump all over him. They would say or write anything to take him down, would have no problem blaming him for the current state of the economy. That was what the media did to rich people.

Wells texted his driver to meet him at the building’s side entrance in four minutes, then met his bodyguard, Dov, at the elevators.

Wells’s executive assistant, Thomason, was already at his side, whispering a litany of updates into his ear on the current news and state of the economy. “Police haven’t pinpointed the cause of the crash yet, not ruling out terrorism, the bridge is closed, all traffic into and out of Manhattan is snarled.”

“You contracted the chopper for Sally and the kids?”

“Fueled and ready.” Thomason barely skipped a beat. “Vandy stock is down another seven points as of ten minutes ago, two more analysts rating it a sell, and the broader market is down another thirty percent at the closing bell—”

Wells put his hand up to stop Thomason as they got into the elevator. “I need to calm down.”

“Yes, sir.”

They rode down to the ground level. The back elevators led to the executive entrance, an unmarked door that fronted Forty-Seventh Street. Wells used it half of the time he exited the building, figuring he didn’t want to be too predictable in his comings and goings. He understood that the chances of someone’s trying to kidnap or assassinate him were slim, but better safe
than sorry, and anyway, the last week had not been normal times for a banking CEO.

The elevator dinged for the ground floor, and Dov got out first, as was his custom, checking the hallway for threats. He waved Wells and Thomason out, and the three of them exited the building out a safety door.

The street met Wells with a wall of noise. It was pandemonium: horns honking, people yelling, engines idling. Traffic was at a standstill on Forty-Seventh, and great waves of pedestrians seemed to be running back and forth on the sidewalks. Wells realized immediately that getting to the press conference—they’d booked a room at an NBC studio at Rockefeller Plaza—was not going to be easy.

“We might have to walk, sir,” Thomason said, scanning the street, and Wells nodded in agreement.

Dov opened his mouth to say something—probably to object, to say how dangerous that was, Wells thought—when out of the corner of his eye Wells saw a trio of people approaching, walking right at him, one of them holding something in the air as if to present it to him. The person holding the thing in the air—a woman—was yelling at him, but Wells couldn’t hear her over the noise. Dov noticed them too and was in front of Wells in a flash, his hand reaching inside of his blue blazer, probably already on the grip of his Glock 23.

“Freeze!” Dov said in his thick Israeli accent, but the people kept coming, undeterred, which Wells thought was a bad thing, maybe even a dangerous thing, but before he could say anything, a fourth figure flashed at them from his left side, a big guy in camouflage, and he draped himself over Dov before the Israeli could react.

“Not so fast, buddy,” the guy in camo said, arms wrapped around Dov. Dov tried to buck him off, but the two of them careened onto the hood of a parked car, slamming into the steel and then bouncing to the ground like wrestlers in a staged match.

“What the fuck . . . ,” Wells barked, but the woman was ten feet away now, yelling at Wells.

“Special Agent Jayanti Chaudry, FBI!” she said, and now Wells could see that the thing she was holding up to him was a Federal Bureau of Investigation badge. “Robert Andrew Wells? We need to talk.”

Wells didn’t believe any of it. This woman did not look like an FBI agent,
and if she was, why wasn’t she surrounded by other agents, instead of a goon wearing fatigues and another younger man in jeans and a T-shirt. None of it made any sense.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I’m calling the police—and you need to let go of my bodyguard.” As Wells moved toward Dov to try kicking at the soldier who had him pinned, a young woman stepped in his path. She was frizzy haired and chubby and had a canister of pepper spray in her hand—pointed right at Wells.

“Na, na, na, no way.” She sounded as if she’d just stepped off the D train from the Bronx. “Back it up, buddy. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Wells flinched and stepped backward, looking now for Thomason, but his executive assistant was already running down the block, moving away from the trouble as fast as his legs could carry him. Wells cursed him silently, promising to fire him the moment he got out of this jam.

“You’ve got serious trouble,” a voice snapped at him. Wells turned to see the young man in jeans strutting up to him. He radiated an almost swaggering confidence. “And if you don’t deal with it, you’re screwed.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Garrett Reilly. I work the bond desk at Jenkins and Altshuler.”

Wells blinked in surprise. What the hell was this all about? Yet, the name was familiar. Somewhere in the back of his head he knew who Garrett Reilly was.

“Someone’s about to take down Vandy,” Reilly said. “Bring the biggest too-big-to-fail bank to its knees and kill the economy.”

Wells shook his head vehemently. “That’s insane. It can’t be done.”

“Really? Have you taken a look around today?” Reilly swept his hand out across the snarled traffic and the cacophony of honking horns. “This look normal to you?”

“It has nothing to do with Vandy.”

“It has everything to do with Vandy. Don’t be an idiot.”

Wells, an angry scowl gashing his face, stepped toward Reilly. If these people were assassins, then fine, let them shoot him, but he was not going to be told about the finance business by anybody, especially not some asshole kid. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but you don’t know shit about my business, so let my goddamned bodyguard go, because I have a press conference
to attend. I need to actually try to calm this city down, not listen to whack-job conspiracy theories.”

“You have a mole in your company. Somewhere inside the bank. And that mole is on the verge of leveraging you out of business.”

Wells froze. His mind raced. If there was one thing he actually did fear, it was exactly that: an employee deep inside his company, someone with access to funds and trades and derivatives, who had an ax to grind or was just plain incompetent, and who, by making terrible, horrifically stupid bets, hollowed out the finances of Vandy and leveraged the bank into the ground. Wells had called innumerable meetings on just this topic and had had endless consultants tell him how to prevent this from occurring, but still the idea haunted him: one man, secreted away on a trading desk, slowly placing bet after bet on highly speculative investments. Investments that would all come due at once and create such a tidal wave of debt that Vandy imploded before anyone could stop it from happening.

It would be a bank run to end all bank runs.

“How do you know?”

“Crowdsourcing,” the young man said.

Wells let out a snort of astonishment. Was this a joke? “You asked the idiots who troll Internet comment sections what their opinion was, and you’re peddling that to me as some kind of catastrophe warning? Are you nuts?” Before Reilly could answer, Wells suddenly remembered where he’d heard the name before. He was— “Avery Bernstein’s boy. You’re one of his homegrown quants. A pattern geek.”