The King of Fear: A Garrett Reilly Thriller (31 page)

V
ANDERBILT
F
RINK
, J
UNE
25, 9:25 A.M.

J
effrey Thomason could remember the exact moment his disgust overwhelmed his obsession with the finance industry. He was an assistant on the desk of a Vanderbilt derivatives trader—a cruel, self-centered middle-aged man whose every other word seemed to be
motherfucker
—and Thomason had been told, for the fourth time in two hours, to get the trader another coffee from the Starbucks in the building’s lobby. Thomason got a call on his cell phone while waiting in line for the coffee. His mother told him that his father had had a stroke and was in the hospital, but Thomason could only stay on the phone for a minute, because late-delivered coffee would be viewed as a termination offense, just like talking on a cell phone during work hours.

But when he handed his boss the coffee, seven minutes later, the derivatives trader didn’t even bother to taste it; he uncapped the cup and tossed the coffee into Thomason’s face, screaming at him in front of the entire trading floor for letting his coffee go cold. But the coffee wasn’t cold; it scalded, and Thomason had to sprint to the bathroom and run cold water over his chin and neck to keep his skin from blistering.

He should have quit right then. Just walked out the door. But he needed the money, needed the job, and quite honestly, he didn’t have the balls to leave. Some part of him still wanted to succeed at Vandy. But the ember of rage and humiliation had been lit, and every minute of every day it grew hotter.

His father didn’t die. He was released from the hospital a week later. Thom
ason became more compliant, more subservient, faster and smarter. He got a raise—albeit a small one—and was transferred first to a VP’s desk, and then all the way to the top, to Robert Andrew Wells Jr.’s desk on the thirty-first floor. In the two years it took him to get there, Thomason plotted his revenge. He mapped out ways to attack the company, steal from Vandy, ruin the traders on the floor. He concocted schemes and plans, but he could never quite figure out how to pull them off.

Until Ilya Markov appeared in his life.

The meeting had been online, on the darknet. It hadn’t been entirely serendipitous, because Thomason had been searching for someone like Markov for more than a year, someone who would provide Thomason with the expertise and the planning, but also with the courage to actually follow through on his ideas. They felt each other out, each probing the motivations of the other, until Thomason felt fairly certain that Markov was the real deal. He’d never seen Markov or talked to him on the phone; he didn’t even know Markov’s real name until a few weeks ago. But he picked up that Markov was smart, brilliant even, and that he was capable of doing real damage: to the traders, to Vandy, maybe even to the world at large.

Over the course of months, Markov had helped Thomason develop a plan. Markov coached him on wooing allies to the cause, helped him set up offshore bank accounts, and even taught him rudimentary social-engineering tricks: how to steal personal data, how to guess account names and numbers, and, most important, how to appear innocent when you were in truth horrifically guilty.

There was more to Thomason’s plans than just simple revenge. He felt that he was saving the world. He’d come to realize that trading houses were mirror images of Mafia families. They had godfathers (or CEOs), lieutenants (or traders); they both moved commodities (drugs or stocks), both extorted money (from strip-club owners or Fortune 500 companies); they were rapacious and paranoid and convinced that the government was out to get them, which in both cases was actually true.

But the real parallel was that both mob families and trading houses were parasites latched onto the flesh of the public. They fed on the trust and integrity of honest, hardworking Americans, and they never looked back. No one at Vanderbilt Frink had a conscience, and Thomason could only guess that the
same held true in the Gambino or Trafficante families. Both entities needed to be destroyed, for the good of the nation and humanity, of this Jeffrey Thomason was absolutely certain. Thomason could do little about the mob, so he went after Vandy.

He was not without resources. Like-minded assistants worked throughout the building—a surprising number of them. They had kowtowed to traders and analysts and vice presidents, fetched coffee and dry cleaning, worked until midnight and over the holidays, provided sexual favors if they were women or if their bosses were gay—their bosses were all men—and basically rolled over and played dead whenever told that it was important to do so. For all of this, they did not receive praise or more money or career advancement.

Thomason’s main allies were Benny Barnett, the assistant to Aldous Mackenzie, the chief investment officer, on the thirty-first floor, and Matt Raillot, the assistant to the biggest derivatives broker in the building, Otto Beardsley, one floor below. Together, the three assistants worked in three of the four most powerful offices at Vandy. Only the compliance desk was left out, and that was fine, because compliance could bring the whole scheme crashing down in an instant.

What they had was access. Access to trading platforms, to accounts, to monitoring software. They had links, passwords, account names and numbers. Some they came by honestly, but most they just pilfered. With them, Thomason and his cohort could see exactly what their bosses could see. And more important, once they had those passwords and account numbers, they could move money just as quickly, just as invisibly, as their bosses could. Thomason himself couldn’t trade—the CEO of a place such as Vandy did little buying and selling—but he could tell other divisions how to behave, nudge them away from watching the things that were going on right under their noses.

And so he did.

Raillot, the assistant to the chief derivatives trader, had slowly, methodically built up positions on wildly risky loan derivatives over the last two months. The algorithms that ran those derivatives were so dense, and the positions so complicated, that only a few people in the company could have figured out what the liabilities were. But Thomason had made sure no one had the chance. He’d sent a quiet e-mail to the techs at the real-time risk-analytics desk six weeks ago asking them to focus exclusively on the company’s stock positions; the derivatives
traders, Thomason had written—from Wells’s account—were switching over to cash and standing down for a while.

Barnett, the assistant to the CIO, had then shorted a basket of smaller stocks. The trigger to cover on those stock shorts was a jump in their share price. Their share prices would move up if the derivatives Raillot had placed on those very same stocks unwound. The whole thing was a financial Rube Goldberg machine—you drop a ball down a chute over here, and it flips a switch over there, which drops a cage on a rat down below. Bing, bang, kaboom.

Or maybe, Thomason thought as he watched the Bloomberg terminal at his desk outside of Wells’s mammoth corner office, this was more of a time bomb than a jerry-rigged contraption. He had sent an e-mail to his allies five minutes ago. That had lit the fuse. The first explosion would hit in another five minutes, when the clock hit 9:31 a.m., one minute after the market opened, the execute time on the first set of derivatives coming due. Money would be owed. Not a lot of money, at least not in Vandy terms, but enough—$42 million.

A handful of other derivatives had been linked to that first one, each with a payout ratio of one hundred to one. Each of those other derivatives was valued in the $100 million range, and each was signed with counterparties at other large trading firms. Firms that were blood enemies of Vanderbilt Frink, that had signed on to those deals without a second’s hesitation. At a hundred to one, each derivative was a liability in the $10 billion range. And there were a dozen of them.

And that was just the beginning.

The fallout from all the trades would put Vandy in a hole so deep, and put it in that hole so fast, that by 10:30 a.m. the bank would be unable to meet its obligations. Vandy would seize up. News of the potential collapse would hit the nation’s TVs, and every single depositor across the country would race to withdraw their money from Vanderbilt Frink. Given how skittish Americans had become about their financial system in the last twenty-four hours, this bank run would be unlike any ever seen before.

It would be Armageddon by sunset.

Thomason closed his eyes to relish the moment, listening to the buzz of phones and the low chatter of people coming in and out of the secured hallways. He checked his watch: 9:28 a.m. Two minutes until the markets opened. All the bank’s senior management were on the tenth floor, meeting with Wells
in the conference room. That was good; they were out of the way. Now Thomason needed to grab all his papers, erase everything on his computer, then head to the airport and grab the flight that Ilya Markov had set up for him. Thomason, like Edward Snowden before him, was going to flee the country before the shit hit the fan. Markov had secured a place for him and his coconspirators in Caracas, with visas in place and temporary apartments in their names.

Did Thomason really want to spend the rest of his days in Venezuela? No, he did not. But a considerable amount of money would be waiting for him when he got there, and once the heat died down, he figured he could go to any number of exotic countries and lead the kind of leisurely existence that he’d been preparing for all his life. Yes, this path was a shortcut to riches and fame, but it was a path nonetheless.

He checked his terminal again, to see if anything big had hit the news wires, then started to send a final e-mail to Raillot at the derivatives desk, to make sure that all the other triggers were about to go off as well. Markov had told him that there would be a spectacular bit of business first thing this morning, something that would send a shock wave through a particular stock, but Thomason didn’t know what that bit of business—or that stock—was. He didn’t really care—he just wanted enough time to catch a cab to JFK.

And then, like a light going out, his computer froze. Just stopped dead. No e-mails going out, no new screens coming up if he clicked them. He checked his Bloomberg terminal, and it too had stopped. The scroll was dead, his news RSS had locked up, and the tiny video feed in the corner was stalled on a frame of Maria Bartiromo’s open mouth.

Thomason stood up, surprised, and walked quickly to Jessica Bortles’s desk a few feet away. Bortles was prim and upright and still very much on board with the Vandy lifestyle, but she was a tech geek through and through, and if anyone had an explanation for what was going on, it would be her.

“Hey, your computer working?” he asked, trying to sound casual. The minutes were now ticking down to his flight and escape from the country.

Bortles looked up at Thomason, and he immediately sensed hostility. There was a coldness, a distance, in her eyes, and the way she pressed her lips together had a sealed, grim quality. She forced a smile, but it was tepid at best. “You didn’t get the e-mail?” She adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

“No. What e-mail?”

Bortles stood up, gathering her purse from the back of her chair. “I think there’s a bit of a problem.” She blocked the door from the office suite to the hallway with her tiny body. “And you’re apparently part of it.”

• • •

They stopped first at the IT desk. Wells led the way, cursing as he went, and Garrett followed, with Chaudry at his side. The geeks in IT had never before been blessed with the physical presence of the company’s CEO in their offices. A few of them had never actually seen Wells in the flesh; one didn’t even know that he was the head of the company.

“Shut down the entire system,” Wells said, marching past the cubicles of computer screens to the IT director’s cluttered office. “Do it now.”

Gutierrez, the head of IT, a dowdy woman of maybe thirty-five, couldn’t wrap her head around shutting down information systems to the entire building, but when Wells leaned over her desk and barked six inches from her glasses, his white, bubbled spit spotting her lenses, she squeaked that she would do her best.

“We could shut down electricity to the building, I guess. Maybe,” Gutierrez said.

Garrett felt bad for her. “You’ve got to have a main Internet trunk line coming in, right?”

“We do,” Gutierrez said. Garrett thought she might burst into tears.

“Pull the plug on that. Just cut it off.”

“I’m not sure we can.”

Garrett turned his palms upward with a grin. “Come on, be creative. It’s fun.” He looked out her door to the IT geeks beginning to cluster around a single desk. “Tell your team to shut down the e-mail system first. Then cut off the Bloomberg feed. I know that can be done, because it goes down in my office once a week. Then go floor by floor. Isolate all the trading desks one by one.”

They marched out of her office before she could reply, with Wells again taking the lead and charging to the elevators. He had called up to Bortles on the thirty-first floor five minutes earlier—he said he trusted her with his life—and told her to keep everyone at his or her seat. No one leaves.

Garrett said he thought that was a bad idea, but Wells, once he’d decided
to go through with Garrett’s plan, had taken over and would not be dissuaded from leading.

“It’s what I do,” he yelled at Garrett. “My company.”

When they arrived on the thirty-first floor, a half dozen employees were huddled around a woman lying on the floor, her nose bloodied and her glasses smashed.

“What happened?” Wells asked as he knelt beside Jessica Bortles, propping up her head.

“I tried to stop him,” she said between tears. “But he twisted my arm and then punched me in the face.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wells said.

Garrett looked around the office. A hallway led to a bank of elevators, and beyond that another set of executive-office suites. Garrett pointed. “What’s down there?”

“CFO offices. VPs and public relations,” Wells said.

Garrett shook his head. Thomason wouldn’t have gone that way. But where would he go? Down, to the lobby? Garrett dialed Mitty. She answered immediately.