Crash Page 9

  “Work traffic will be heavy at that time of the morning, but most of it will be coming into the city, so there should be no problems in the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey. Alexei and I will be right behind you in the Mercedes for the pickup once you’re in place.”

  The New York Stock Exchange backup computer was located in Union City on the second floor of a nondescript office building, the first floor of which was the World Wide Destinations Travel Agency.

  “Viktor will park in front at 0930. Once Arkadi has set the timer for 0945, the two of them will dismount and walk one block south to the corner, where Alexei and I will be waiting. We will drive immediately to JFK for our 12:10 flight home,” Bykov said. “Questions?”

  “What if we’re stopped by the police?” Kolchin asked.

  “No reason for it to happen, unless you drive erratically or exceed the speed limit.”

  “It’s not as bad as Moscow, but everyone speeds here,” Alexei Mazayev said. He would be driving the Mercedes. He’d been a military intelligence junior officer before transferring to the Spetsnaz, where he’d come to Bykov’s attention. The two of them had become friends over the past several years, and had been mistaken for brothers because they looked so much alike.

  “Go with the flow,” Bykov said. “Just don’t stand out.”

  Kolchin, who at six feet and just under a stocky one hundred kilos was the hothead of the group, started to raise his hand, but Bykov cut him off.

  “We will do everything within our power to avoid getting into a gun battle with the local cops.”

  “I won’t leave my weapon here,” Kolchin said.

  “None of us will. All I’m saying is that I want this to go down easy and clean. But if we’re backed into a corner, we will defend ourselves, and if need be, separate and execute the exfiltrate plan.”

  Kolchin nodded.

  “You have your kits including money and papers, as well as alternate airport routes. You know the escape, evade, and disperse drill.”

  No one said a thing.

  “Once we reach the parking garage at JFK, we’ll leave the weapons in the trunk of the car, along with all of our secondary papers in a burn bag that will be set to go off if tampered with.

  “Inside the terminal we’ll separate and go through security at our planned intervals. At no time will we attempt to communicate with each other until we’re off the plane at home.”

  Still no one said anything.

  “Are we clear, tovarisches?” Bykov asked.

  “Yasno.”

  FIVE

  PROJECT W

  26

  After an hour and a half spent working on corrections to the problem with W, Ben and Faircloth went across to admin, where they were immediately admitted to Rear Admiral Paul Huggard’s office. The two-star was in charge of the Navy Yard overall, but at this moment in time, W was his top priority by a very wide margin.

  Faircloth was carrying several sheets of blueprints under his left arm, and Ben had brought along his rough drawings and calculations in a copybook marked TOP SECRET on the front cover.

  The admiral, his jacket off, was seated behind his desk when the two men walked in, came to attention, and saluted crisply. Huggard returned the salute and smiled.

  “Civilians don’t salute,” he said.

  “Old habit, sir,” Ben said. “But we have a problem.”

  Huggard, who was one year shy of retirement, was a silver-haired bear of a man, standing well over six feet and weighing 220 pounds on a good day. But he still put in a credible workout at the base gym, often beating men half his age.

  “I figured as much,” he said, his smile fading. His career-capping goal was to see W operational. And each time Ben and Faircloth showed up in his office with what he called “the look,” he could see his goal fading.

  “Maybe we should go into your conference room so we can spread out the blueprints, sir,” Faircloth said.

  “Big problem or little problem?”

  “Big problem,” Ben said.

  “Shit.”

  “But I think that it can be fixed.”

  “Oughta be fixed, can be fixed, or must be fixed to save the boat?” the admiral asked. His Ph.D. from MIT was in naval engineering, and he was damn good. Among the best in the navy, which was why he’d been picked to manage this project.

  “Must,” Faircloth said.

  “Ben?” Huggard said.

  “I’m in complete agreement.”

  The admiral reluctantly got to his feet, and the three of them went to the adjoining conference room, which could seat eight comfortably. In the past year he had come to call the place the Hemorrhage Palace, because every time Ben and Faircloth came over with a problem, the navy would end up hemorrhaging money, and the blame would fall on his shoulders.

  “Okay, what is it this time?”

  Faircloth laid out the first page of the blueprints, and Ben held them in place with four ship’s coins he’d brought over for the purpose.

  “The drive tubes,” the admiral said. “Or the drive itself?”

  “The MHD unit works per specs, but it’s the tubes,” Ben said. “Stress fractures.”

  “We expected it.”

  “Which is why we specified hardened titanium for the support struts.”

  “So?” Huggard asked.

  “At two specific frequencies, each covering a narrow band of less than fifty cycles per second, we think that a harmonic wave is induced into the struts. From there it’s transferred to the drive tubes, and the tubes open up.”

  “A hole in the hull?”

  “Holes in the hull, collectively big enough to sink the boat,” Ben said, pointing out the eight places along the tubes that he’d marked with a yellow highlighter.

  “Are you suggesting we scrap the entire project?” the admiral asked.

  “No, sir,” Faircloth said. “Ben has come up with a couple of fixes.”

  “I’m all ears, gentlemen,” Huggard said. “Impress me.”

  “The cheapest fix—in fact the one that would cost almost no money—would be simply to reprogram the MHD’s operational computer to bypass the two frequency ranges that cause the problem.”

  Huggard saw the issue immediately. “The operational capabilities would be impaired.”

  “But not seriously,” Ben said, though he didn’t believe it.

  “We couldn’t know that until we had precision sea trials. Under simulated battle conditions.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said. “Evasion maneuvers in which speeds would have to be randomly and quickly changed to confuse the enemy’s targeting computers.”

  The admiral took only a moment to make his decision. “That’s out. We’re not going to send personnel to sea putting their lives at risk because of a design flaw.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said, very glad that the navy had seen fit to send the right officer to administer the project.

  “You mentioned two fixes.”

  “Ben came up with it, and it’s ingenious,” Faircloth said.

  “Ingenious as in how many tens of millions of dollars?” Huggard asked.

  “Actually I’m thinking more like eight hundred—” Ben started, but the admiral interrupted him.

  “Eight hundred million?”

  “No, Admiral. Eight new struts at one hundred thousand dollars each. Eight hundred thousand total, plus maybe one month for the retrofitting, and then we’d be ready for sea trials.”

  “Show me.”

  Ben opened his copybook to the sketches he’d made, along with the underlying calculations, and laid it on top of the blueprints.

  “The solid titanium struts go into harmonic vibrations at the two frequency ranges we talked about. I’m suggesting we use thick-walled but hollow struts and fill them with nitrogen gas at pressure to dampen the harmonics.”

  The admiral looked at Ben’s math. “At what pressure?” he asked. “If it’s too high the struts themselves could pose a danger of exploding, sending shrapnel though the
boat’s hull.”

  “I did some of the math in my head on the way over. But we’ll need to run a simulation on the mainframe to check me out.”

  “As I said: Impress me.”

  “I’m thinking in the range of twenty-five to thirty-five psi.”

  “Pounds per square inch. The same pressure in an automobile’s tires,” the admiral said. “I’m impressed.”

  * * *

  On the way back to the warehouse Faircloth was upbeat. “Impressing an admiral is not an easy thing to do, pal. But you sure as hell knocked it out of the ballpark.”

  “We did,” Ben said absently. He’d been thinking about Cassy.

  Faircloth stopped. “Okay, Ben, it’s me you’re talking to. What’s up?”

  “I’m a little worried about Cassy.”

  “Do you think that she’s running around on you? I mean, you’re bright and all that, but frankly you’re not much to look at.”

  Ben had to chuckle. “It’s nothing like that. But something is going on at work, and I think it’s got her…”

  “Worried?” Faircloth asked.

  “Frightened.”

  “Call her right now, and then let’s have some lunch. Arguing with a two-star has always made me hungry.”

  * * *

  Cassy’s cell phone rolled over to voicemail after five rings, but it wasn’t terribly worrisome to Ben. A lot of times she switched her phone to silent mode when she was deep into a new project.

  He called her shift supervisor, Francis Masters, who answered on the second ring.

  “Masters.”

  “It’s Ben Whalen. I’ve tried to reach Cassy, but she’s not answering her cell. Can you ask her to give me a call whenever she’s free?”

  “Sure thing, but it’ll have to wait until after lunch.”

  “She’s busy?”

  “She’s not available,” Masters said, and he hung up.

  Cassy had said her immediate supervisor was a jerk, and this confirmed it. Ben’s worry went up a notch. Something wasn’t right. He could feel it in his gut.

  SIX

  CONFRONTATIONS

  27

  Reid Treadwell spotted Betty Ladd sitting at her usual table in 1792. Motioning the maître d’ away, he went across to her, curious but not particularly concerned why she wanted to see him so urgently.

  She was texting someone, and she looked up, a neutral expression on her face. Despite himself, Reid still thought that she was a fine-looking woman, and he almost regretted dumping her. Almost. And he smiled thinking about how she had reacted.

  She put her phone down. “What are you all smiley about, Treadwell?” she demanded, the famous Ladd frown lowering the corners of her mouth. “Isn’t the world economic order on the highway to hell?”

  Treadwell sat down across from her. “That’s what Seymour thinks.”

  “He’s hardly ever wrong.”

  The headwaiter came over, and Treadwell ordered coffee.

  “Well, if he’s right this time, Burnham Pike will do what it can like we did in ’08.”

  “The word is that your people are expecting the Chinese to implode over a brouhaha between the government and the PBOC.”

  “Who told you that?” Treadwell asked, masking his surprise.

  She smiled faintly. “Manhattan is a small town after all. Especially this end of it.” She drank some still-steaming coffee. “I’ve also heard that you people have been converting your in-house capital into cash and have sprinkled it around to FDIC-insured banks. Of course by law, you’d need to publicly disclose such a big move.”

  Treadwell shrugged nonchalantly. It was his signature gesture in tense situations. “If such a thing were true—and I’m not saying it is or it isn’t—we’d be within our rights not to disclose it until we filed our quarterly with the SEC. And that’s two months from now.”

  “Sounds like some more of Hank Serling’s doublespeak,” Ladd said. She leaned across the table, venom in her narrowed eyes. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you were pulling a stunt like that. You have clients who’ve invested billions with you. If you were making a move to protect the bank’s assets, you’d be required to offer the same protection to your clients.”

  Treadwell’s coffee came, and he took his time stirring four packets of Splenda in the cup.

  “Quit stalling, Treadwell. I want some answers that make sense, or I swear to Christ I’ll nail your fucking hide to the front door downstairs as a warning to other pricks like you.”

  Treadwell continued stirring. “Sorry, Betts, but I like my coffee sweet, just like my women.” It was a riff on Ladd’s old saying that she liked her coffee hot, just like her men.

  She didn’t rise to the bait. “Treating clients’ money differently than your proprietary capital is against securities law, as you damned well know. We could kick you off the exchange, the SEC could put BP out of business, and you would end up in jail.”

  Treadwell grinned. “I hope it won’t come to that,” he said. “I’m told that prison coffee isn’t very good.” He looked around at the nearly empty room. “I’d miss this, you know.” He looked directly at her. “Especially you.”

  She ignored his flirting. “I remember the stunt BP pulled in ’08. I wasn’t in charge of the exchange then, but if I had been, you assholes would have been swinging on the gallows.”

  “Just like you, I wasn’t the boss then either.”

  “But you were part of the inner circle. I’d guess one of the engineers behind the slippery short sales.”

  In 2008, the subprime mortgage market was burning down. Amid the housing boom leading up to the crisis, banks had issued truckloads of mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, called “liar’s loans.” The banks didn’t bother insisting that borrowers document their ability to pay even the interest, because the surge of subprime mortgages was jacking up home prices right through the roof. Everyone was getting rich.

  Treadwell’s favorite story about those days was of the Las Vegas stripper who had no savings but had financed five houses, which she planned to flip at a higher price to avid buyers on the hot real estate scene. It was like playing at the slots, only this was a sure bet, she—like just about everyone else—thought.

  Her plan was to pay off the loans and pocket the difference. But she was too late. The housing market collapsed, and she was out in the cold.

  The smaller banks didn’t care that the loans were as rotten as last week’s fruit basket. They made their money by selling them to the big firms on Wall Street, such as Burnham Pike, which packaged hundreds of the loans into bonds, called mortgage-backed securities, and sold them to investors with no savvy.

  When mortgages, by the thousands, defaulted, the bonds became worthless, the investors got screwed, and the financial crisis was in full swing.

  Treadwell smiled. “What we did in ’08 was perfectly legal, and even you have to know it.”

  “That’s open to interpretation, Treadwell,” she said sharply. “You people conned your investors like old-fashioned carney barkers. You knew damned well that the bonds were going into the pits, so you bet against your own customers. Doesn’t get sleazier than that.”

  Burnham Pike had sold the bonds short in’08, just as Treadwell and Dammerman were doing now with the S&P, waiting for the Abacus-fueled inferno. The company had made billions on those bond-shorting trades, and technically speaking it was legal.

  When BP’s CEO and the company’s legal counselor were called before an irate congressional committee the next year, Treadwell’s predecessor claimed the shorting was a “routine hedging tactic” that all smart investors employed as insurance in the unlikely event that a trade went bad.

  But Treadwell wasn’t about to tell the president of the New York Stock Exchange, or anyone else, for that matter, that he and his COO were shorting the primary stock market index using secret offshore accounts in an expectation of a Wall Street wipeout.

  Nor would he tell her that BP would be the last
, or among the last, investment firms able to mint a fortune in the ruins with little or no competition.

  Nor that he, Dammerman, and O’Connell would enjoy huge bonuses in addition to the short-selling profits they would make. Nor that Spencer Nast, who’d leaked them CIA secrets about China’s possible troubles, would get his super-bonus once he rejoined the firm after his Washington stint.

  Ladd was visibly angry, and it did Treadwell’s heart good to see a woman he considered an ice maiden losing control. “You’re not being very nice this morning, Betts,” he said, goading her.

  “My name is not Betts, and no, I’m not nice,” she said loudly enough for the few other pre-lunch customers to overhear. But they looked away, no one wanting to offend two feuding Wall Street gods.

  “Well, Ladd, don’t think for one minute that Burnham Pike would fail to give its clients the heads-up on a possible financial catastrophe.”

  In fact, this one was covered. To withstand some official inquiry from Congress or the SEC or whoever down the road, Treadwell had personally directed BP’s client services department to warn the wealthy people, the pension programs, the university endowments, the charitable foundations, and all those who entrusted the firm to run their money.

  They would start today after the market closed. By then, of course, it would be too late, unless the brighter clients acted immediately in the overnight markets.

  By opening bell tomorrow, Abacus would be a done deal; the crash would begin and ripple across the entire planet.

  “Knowing you like I do, your clients will get the word, but not until BP’s capital has been safely tucked away.”

  She was right about at least that much. BP wasn’t about to let panicky clients rush to sell, disrupting the market while the firm was disposing of its own assets.

  “We’re positioning the firm to help our clients and the entire investing community. You know damned well that a strong Burnham Pike is good for Wall Street and good for America. We won’t become another Lehman Brothers. Nor will we hold our hand out for a bailout if things do go south.”