Drummer In the Dark (35 page)

57

Monday

T
HERE WAS AN osmosis quality required for top Washington lobbyists, an ability to read the political winds and react accordingly. Any lobbyist who waited until results were official was doomed to banishment and life in the wastelands beyond the Beltway. Valerie walked into her office that morning and instantly scented the change. People she had seldom spoken with were coming up, searching her out, trying to attach their careers to her ascending star. Two of the four senior partners made a point of stopping by the downstairs chamber that had become her team’s ops center. Supposedly they just happened by, as though they made the light-years journey between floors every day.

Two hours later she climbed the stairs and found her boss and the firm’s incumbent chairman huddled in the doorway to the boardroom. It was a perfect place for Valerie to declare, “We’ve completed our straw poll of committee members.”

Both of them grinned, discerning the news before she spoke. “Home run for the home team.”

“That’s the way it looks to us.”

“Come on in here,” the incumbent said. He gestured toward one of the suede-and-chrome chairs. “Try this on for a ride.”

“I’ve been in here before, thank you very much.”

“Not as a partner, you haven’t.” He patted the seat back and said to her former boss, “Is that corner suite ready?”

“Her name’s not on the door yet, but I doubt she’ll mind.”

Valerie slid into the seat, sighing ecstatically. “Nice.” It wasn’t her own firm, but there were advantages to having company along for the ride. Especially at a moment like this. “Very nice indeed.”

They took the two chairs to either side. “So the holdouts have come through.”

“They’ve said as much.” She gave the chair a little swivel. “We’re ahead by one vote for certain, possibly as many as three.”

“Val.” The incumbent leaned forward. “Given the situation, we’d like you to bury the personal stuff on Bryant.”

She halted in midswing. “What?”

“The senior partner is weighing in on this pretty heavily.” Her former boss was apologetic but firm. “He sees his chance of a top-level appointment going right down the drain if this is ever traced back to us.”

“Which it would be,” the incumbent intoned. “There is only one place this could have come from, that’s what they’ll say.”

She saw it then. The careful maneuvering, the friendly probes. Setting her up so she revealed the situation before they struck. Being handled by pros. “I suppose I have no say in this matter.”

“You said it yourself, Val. This thing is won.” He used his most soothing tone. Stroking out any hard feelings. “Something like this you can just tuck away, save it for the next time you get Wynn Bryant in your sights.”

But this was personal, she wanted to shout. She wanted to watch Wynn Bryant bleed. She’d already planned to record his resignation off C-Span, toast his departure for weeks to come. “I’ve already put out a couple of leads.”

The two men exchanged a swift glance. The incumbent said evenly, “Don’t feed them any more. We’ll just have to hope they don’t come up with enough meat to carry it forward.”

“The half-life on something this big must be a thousand years,” her former boss agreed. “And the old man won’t be around here to stop you next time.”

58

Monday

A
T SEVEN THAT evening, traders finally began straggling off the Hayek Group’s trading floor. Eric was among the first to leave. The swelling to his forehead and lip had gone down over the weekend, and the traders were now too busy to rib him any further. The common wisdom was that he had struck a doorpost hurtling from a forbidden bedroom. Eric said almost nothing, kept to himself, and avoided Colin. Which granted Colin the excuse not to confront his pal with what he knew. And worse, what he suspected.

Around ten, the paper shrapnel cleared and the senior traders left the pit. Colin was still in his cubicle, a lonely circle of light in the midst of a dark fluorescent night. He remained because he could feel the storm gathering, and because he had nowhere else to go. At home, Lisa’s absence felt too much like personal deprogramming. The best of everything had been lost along with her, every day’s clarity erased. He had tried to rewrite his memories of the whole affair as just another warped and twisted mind game imposed by a merciless reality. But it did not help. Nothing did.

Alex swung around the corner with the ease of a man too tired to care whether or not he was welcome. He slumped into the visitor’s chair and announced, “If Hayek is right, we’re going to clear six months’ profit off this battle. If he’s wrong, they’ll sweep me out with tomorrow’s garbage.”

Colin used his well-chewed pen to point at the central screen, on which he had thrown up the floor’s highest camera, the one showing the upstairs balcony. “It’s empty now, but they started showing up about noon.”

“I saw.” Alex leaned over, squinted into the screen, and asked, “How’d you do that?”

“Tapped into the security system. They walked around, made themselves comfortable, checked the monitors, spent a couple of minutes grinning down and watching you guys kill yourselves.”

“Which means either they weren’t in on the action, which I doubt. Or they’d set their dollar positions hours ago.”

Colin said nothing. Just sat and chewed on his pen and watched the empty screen.

Alex eased himself slowly back, testing each muscle in turn. “Hedge funds run off information. We’re hunters and gatherers. I use brokers who give me fresh data, and give it to me first. We bring all this information into one place, and a small group of us makes the decisions. Only nine of us really pull the trigger. Nine senior traders. Seventeen billion and counting on the balance sheet. A lot of ammo.” A pause, then, “You see where I’m headed with this?”

“I really don’t know anything more,” Colin replied solemnly. “If I did, I’d tell you.”

“So you’re not part of this new team who might be running an inside feint on us.”

“Not a chance.”

“What about Hayek’s personal stuff, can you get in there?”

“Out of the question. He uses a special coding system, one-timers off an electronic encryption pad. The man is supercareful.”

Alex backed off a notch. “You’re what they call a hacker, am I right?”

“Since the very beginning,” Colin affirmed, not minding that it was finally out in the open. Wishing he could trust this guy fully. “When I went over to the other side and joined Hayek, I became what is known as a white hat.”

“Hayek’s bound to have something on you,” Alex guessed with a trader’s intuition, far beyond the realm of normal logic. “He’d never just up and give his electronic security to a guy off the street, no matter what credentials he carried.”

Colin had known it was bound to come, had imagined the moment and the response. He did not hesitate. “FEMA.”

“What?”

“Federal Emergency Management Agency. If the Afghanis ever manage to sneak in a nuclear bomb and plant it in Times Square, FEMA will be the people to pick up the pieces. If California finally gets hit by the big one, same thing. They’ve written up reams of contingency plans for everything from terrorist attacks to an attempted military coup to aliens landing on the White House lawn. That’s their job. Imagine the worst that can happen, then find solutions.”

“So?”

“I got caught taking a peek.”

Alex grinned for the first time that day. “No way.”

“Utterly real, I’m afraid. They had an invisible firewall. Lit me up like a Canaveral launch. I was arrested, fingerprinted, photographed. The works. A full dose of reality. Grim and horrid.”

“And Hayek bailed you out?”

“In a manner of speaking. He sent his security man, Dale Crawford. I was nol-prossed, which means no record. Hayek won my undying loyalty.”

“No kidding, alien invasion contingency plans?”

“So I’ve heard. I wasn’t able to see for myself, and after they caught me I was left wondering if anyone has ever really been inside.” Colin began the process of cutting off his electronic bits and pieces. “Whatever the case, FEMA remains one of the dream sites.”

“Like the Everest of hackers.”

“Precisely. Every conspiracy nut in the universe wants a look into their files. Not just to study the eventualities, you understand. FEMA reportedly keeps tabs on what has actually happened. They’re supposed to have records on all sorts of supersecret events.”

“
X-Files
come to life,” Alex said.

“I suppose it was inevitable they would be well protected. Actually, much better shielded than the Pentagon.”

“You’ve hit Defense?”

Colin rose to his feet and flipped the light switch. “Perhaps I should stop there.”

Together they headed for the rear entrance. Alex held his briefcase with two fingers of one hand. His jacket was slung over his other shoulder. His hair was as limp as his tie. “I haven’t felt this tired since the day my ex took me to court. Hayek placed us at the very core of an active bull market. We talked the market up five percent in less than ten hours. Biggest short-term dollar rise in over a year. Everybody’s watching us. The brokers, the Street, everybody. I’ve got dealers I haven’t heard from in years calling me out of the blue, asking why I wasn’t there for the Forex convention this weekend, talking to me like I’ve been lost in the Sumatran jungle and all of a sudden they want to play my best pal.”

“Which means everybody’s looking to hear what big news Hayek is holding,” Colin surmised. “That doesn’t make sense to me. If it was big enough to talk up the dollar, how could he keep it quiet with the whole world sniffing around?”

“Listen to you.” Alex pushed through the doors and entered the parking area. “A backroom geek figures it out after I’ve spent all day hammering on the other senior traders, getting nowhere at all. All they want to know is what bonus they’re clearing off this deal.”

Alex twisted his neck back and forth, hearing it creak. The moon was brilliant enough to outshine the yellow lights rimming the parking area. Cicadas played a summertime chorus in the empty lot across the street. Alex murmured, “Almost looks normal.”

“Whatever that is,” Colin agreed.

“I tell you something, sport. A couple of billion put the other way, a flash of bad news, and you’re going to see people start dumping dollars, stocks, bonds, the works. We’re talking full-scale panic.”

Colin found himself not merely listening to Alex’s words. Suddenly he heard not with his ears alone, but rather with an auxilliary system that did not belong to him at all. He felt another’s presence, gentle as the breath that no longer sighed on his cheek, and it stopped him in his tracks.

He searched the night, saw nothing but softly rattling palms and pools of light in an asphalt sea. He was missing something. The message had not come in words but rather in a whisper of wind. Colin asked, “What would happen?”

The yellow streetlights turned Alex’s features metallic and impossibly hard. “The market would panic in stages. First there’d be this flurry of reverses. The Fed would probably intervene at that point, and hopefully I’d be proven wrong.”

The night became still. The cicadas’ concert drew to a hushed close, the wind halted. “And if the Fed didn’t move?”

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would. Buy a little, shove interest rates up a notch, sometimes just a good word is enough. You know, Big Brother is watching and all is well. But if the news were bad enough, then maybe the Fed’s nudges might be overridden. Then there’d be the risk of the dollar sliding down to the panic stops.”

“The what?”

“Every spot desk has what are called panic stops. Usually it’s the lowest position that currency has hit in the previous twelve months. If the dollar ever gets to that point, the traders would automatically get out of every dollar position they held. It’s called puking your positions, and it is a horrible thing to observe. And rare. I’ve only seen it twice, the day Reagan was shot and then the day Soros and his crowd broke the pound.”

“But what
happens
?”

“Everybody in the business holding serious dollar positions has computerized stops in place. All these stops create an artificial floor. The instant the dollar touches that zone, the market would be flooded with sell orders. The dollar would shoot down a further ten, fifteen, even twenty percent.”

Colin wanted to turn and shriek to the night that he was not the person to receive any such message, not with silence, not with wind, not even with Alex’s words. He just did not know enough. “But it would be corrected, right? The Fed would just do more to prop up the dollar.”

“The Fed
can’t
. The market’s gotten too big, too powerful. The day Reagan was shot, within ten minutes they had closed markets all over the world. But those ten minutes were enough for the dollar to lose eighteen percent of its value. Why? Because all those spot positions are
electronic
.” Alex studied the asphalt at his feet. “Now imagine what would happen if they didn’t know the cause of the slide. The President getting shot, that’s a clear signal, something that will make people act fast. But what if it took them three hours to respond? Or three days?”

“The dollar would collapse,” Colin said, still not seeing.

“Not just the dollar. Investors would pull out from every dollar position they held. Stocks, bonds, futures. Every market in the U.S. would drop into oblivion. There would be a full-scale destruction of the American economy.”

The whisper came again, this time clear enough to turn him around.

He watched as night shadows congealed into a dark, swiftly moving shape. A black automobile shushed forward, a glimmer of oncoming death.

Colin shouted, flung his arm around Alex, and leaped forward. Together they fell behind the fender of a parked Mercedes.

As they struck the asphalt, the automobile hit the opposite fender and broke the bumper loose in a shower of sparks and shrieking metal. Despite the noise, Colin heard yet again the silent whispers, the voices from all the untried paths, the ones telling him it was not over yet.

He wrapped his arms around the sprawled senior trader and rolled, pulling them both as close to the Mercedes’ undercarriage as they could go. The attacker’s motor raced, the bumper tore free and clanged onto the pavement. There were two brilliant flashes and quick bangs. Then a whanging sound by Colin’s ear. Then the car raced away.

Gingerly the pair of them raised up, searched the empty reaches, saw only the splash of streetlights and empty asphalt. Alex gaped about him, and demanded, “Were they after me or you?”

“Use your cellphone,” Colin said. Feeling lightheaded. More. Almost light of heart as well. “Call the police.”

Alex bent over and fumbled with numb fingers at the latches of his briefcase. He hesitated long enough to search the darkness once more and ask, “What should I say, we were attacked by a phantom locomotive?”

“Mention the gunshots,” Colin replied. “That should get them here in a hurry.”