Black Market

A thriller in which a Federal agent and a Wall Street lawyer must race against time to thwart the plan of a secret militia group to firebomb Wall Street and wipe out the financial heart of America.

© 1989

Although
Black Market
is written as fiction, all of what follows could happen, especially the Wall Street financial parts. I would like to thank the people who helped so much in making the background information interesting and authentic.

Sidney Ruthberg-financial editor, Fairchild Publications

James Dowd-Wall Street attorney, formerly of the United States Army

Stephen Bowen-former captain, United States Marine Corps

Katherine McMahon- New York and Paris backgrounds

Joan Ennis-Irish Tourist Board

Thomas Altman- Sedona, Arizona

Barbara Maddalena- New York, Wall Street area

Mindy Zepp- New York

M. Blackstone- Soho

Wall Street, Manhattan: December 1985

The tawdry yellow cab was double-parked at the base of Wall Street, where it intersects with South Street and the East River. Colonel David Hudson leaned his tall, athletic body against its battered trunk.

He raised one hand to his eye and loosely curled his fingers to fashion a makeshift telescope. He carefully studied 40 Wall Street, where Manufacturers Hanover Trust had offices, then 23 Wall, which housed executive suites for Morgan Guaranty. Then the New York Stock Exchange. Trinity Church. Chase Manhattan Plaza. At five in the morning the towering buildings were as impressive and striking as monuments; the feeling of history and stability was overwhelming.

Once he had it all vividly in sight, Colonel Hudson squeezed his fingers tightly together. “
Boom
,” he whispered.

The financial capital of the world completely disappeared behind his clenched fist.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Seconds before five-thirty on that same morning Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky, the man designated Vets 24, sped down the steep, icicle-slick hill that was Metropolitan Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He was in a nine-year-old wheelchair, from the Queens Veterans Administration. Right now he was pretending the chair was a Datsun 280-Z, silver metallic, with a shining T-roof.

“Aahh-eee-ahh!” He let out a banshee screech that pierced the deserted, solemnly quiet streets. His long thin face was buried in the oily collar of a khaki fatigue parka replete with peeling sergeant's stripes, and his frizzy blond ponytail blew behind him like a bike streamer. Periodically he closed his eyes, which were tearing badly in the burning cold wind. His pinched face was getting as red as the gleaming Berry Street stoplight that he was racing through with absolute abandon.

His forehead was burning, but he
loved
the sensation of unexpected freedom. He thought he could actually feel streams of blood surge through his wasted legs again.

Harry Stemkowsky's rattling wheelchair finally came to a halt in front of the all-night Walgreen Drug Store. Under the parka and the two bulky sweaters he wore, his heart was hammering wildly. He was so goddamn excited-his whole life was beginning all over again.

Today, Harry Stemkowsky felt he could do just about anything.

The drugstore's glass door, which he nudged open, was covered with a montage of cigarette posters. Immediately he was blessed with a draft of welcoming warm air, filled with the smells of greasy bacon and fresh-perked coffee. He smiled and rubbed his hands together in a gesture that was almost gleeful. For the first time in years, he was no longer a cripple.

And for the first time in more than a dozen hard years, Harry Stemkowsky had a purpose.

He had to smile. When he wrapped his mind around the whole deal, the full, unbelievable implications of Green Band, he just had to smile.

Right at this moment, Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky, the official messenger for Green Band, was safely at his firebase in New York City. Now it could begin.

Federal Plaza, Manhattan

Inside the fortress that was New York FBI headquarters in Federal Plaza, a tall, silver-haired man, Walter Trentkamp, repeatedly tapped the eraser of his pencil against a faded desk blotter.

Scrawled on the soiled blotter was a single phone number: 202-555-1414. It was the private number for the 'White House, a direct line to the president of the United States.

Trentkamp's telephone rang at precisely 6:00 A.M.

“All right, everybody, please start up audio surveillance now.” His voice was harsh this early in the morning. “I'll hold them as long as I possibly can. Is audio surveillance ready? Well, let's go.”

The legendary FBI Eastern Bureau chief picked up the signaling telephone. The words
Green Band
echoed ominously in his brain. He'd never known anything like this in his Bureau experience, which was long and varied and not without bizarre encounters.

Gathered in a grim, tight circle around the FBI head were some of the more powerfully connected men and women in New York. Not a person in the group had ever experienced anything like this emergency situation, either. In silence, they listened as Trentkamp answered the expected phone call.

“This is the Federal Bureau… Hello?”

There was no reply on the outside line. The tension inside the room could be felt by everyone. Even Trentkamp, whose calm in critical situations was well known, appeared nervous and uncertain.

“I said hello. Are you there?… Is anyone there?… Who is on this line?”

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Walter Trentkamp's frustrated voice was being monitored electronically in a battered mahogany phone booth at the rear of the Walgreen Drug Store in Williamsburg.

Inside the booth, Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky finger combed his long, unkempt hair as he listened. His heart had gone beyond mere pounding; now it was threatening to detonate in his chest. There were new and unusual pulses beating through his body.

This was the long overdue time of truth. There would be no more war-game rehearsals for the twenty-eight members of Green Band.

“Hello? This is Trentkamp. New York FBI.” The phone receiver cradled between Stemkowsky's shoulder and jaw vibrated with each phrase.

After another interminable minute, Harry Stemkowsky firmly depressed the play button on a Sony portable recorder. He then carefully held the pocket recorder flush against the pay phone's receiver.

Stemkowsky had cued the recorder to the first word of the message-”Good.” The “good” stretched to “goood” as the recorder hitched once, then rolled forward with a soft whir.

“Good morning. This is Green Band speaking. Today is December fourth. A Friday. A history-making Friday, we believe.”

Over a squawk box the eerie, high-pitched voice brought the unprecedented message the men and women sequestered in the Manhattan FBI office had been waiting for.

Green Band was beginning
.

Ryan Klauk from FBI Surveillance made a quick judgment that the prerecorded track had been tampered with to make it virtually unrecognizable and probably untraceable.

“As we promised, there are vitally important reasons for our past phone calls this week, for all the elaborate preparations we've made, and had you make to date…

“Is everyone listening? I can only assume you have company, Mr. Trentkamp. No one in corporate America seems to make a decision alone these days… Listen closely, then. Everybody, please listen…

“The Wall Street financial district, from the East River to Broadway, is scheduled to be firebombed today. A large number of randomly selected targets will be completely destroyed late this afternoon.

“I will repeat. Selected targets in the financial district will be destroyed today. Our decision is irrevocable. Our decision is nonnegotiable.

“The firebombing of Wall Street will take place at five minutes past five tonight. It might be an attack by air; it might be a ground attack. Whichever-it will occur at five minutes past five precisely.”

“Wait a minute. You can't-” Walter Trentkamp began to object vehemently, then stopped. He remembered he was attempting to talk back to a prerecorded message.

“All of Manhattan, everything below Fourteenth Street, must be evacuated,” the voice track continued methodically.

“The Target Area Nuclear Survival Plan for New York should be activated right now. Are you listening, Mayor Ostrow? Are you listening, Susan Hamilton? Is your Office of Civil Preparedness listening?

“The Nuclear Survival Plan can save thousands of lives. Please employ it now…

“In case any of you require further concrete convincing, this will be provided as well. Such requests have been anticipated.

“Our seriousness, our utter commitment to this mission, must not be underestimated. Not at any time during this or any future talk we might decide to have.

“Begin the evacuation of the Wall Street financial district now. Green Band cannot possibly be stopped or deterred. Nothing I've said is negotiable. Our decision is irrevocable.”

Harry Stemkowsky abruptly pushed down the stop button. He quickly replaced the telephone receiver. He then rewound the Sony recorder and stuffed it in the drooping pocket of his fatigue jacket.

Done.

He shivered uncontrollably. Christ, he'd done it. He'd actually goddamn done it!

He'd delivered Green Band's message, and he felt terrific. He wanted to scream out. More than that, he wished he could leap two feet in the air and punch the sky.

No formal demands had been made.

Not a single clue had been offered as to why Green Bank was happening.

Stemkowsky's heart was still beating loudly as he numbly maneuvered his wheelchair along an aisle lined with colorful deodorants and toiletries, up toward the gleaming soda fountain counter.

The short-order cook, Wally Lipsky, a cheerfully mountainous three-hundred-and-ten-pound man, turned from scraping the grill as Stemkowsky wheeled up. Lipsky's pink-cheeked face brightened immediately. The semblance of a third or fourth chin appeared out of rolling mounds of neck fat.

“Well, look what Sylvester the Cat musta dragged in offa the street! It's my man Pennsylvania. Whereyabeen keepin' yourself, champ? Long time no see.”

Stemkowsky had to smile at the irresistible fat cook, who had a well-deserved reputation as the Greenpoint neighborhood clown. Hell, he was in the mood to smile at almost anything this morning.

“Oh, he-he-here and there, Wally.” Stemkowsky burst into a nervous stutter. “Muh-Manhattan the mo-most part. I been wuh-working in Manhattan a lot these days.”

Stemkowsky tapped his finger on the tattered cloth tag sewn into the shoulder of his jacket. The patch read VETS CABS AND MESSENGERS. Harry Stemkowsky was one of seven licensed wheelchair cabbies in New York; three of them worked for Vets in Manhattan.

“Gah-gotta good job.
Real
job now, Wah-Wally… Why don't you make us some breakfast?”

“You got it, Pennsylvania. Cabdriver special comin' up. You got it, my man, anything you want.”

Manhattan

As early as six-fifteen that same morning, an endless stream of sullen-looking men and women carrying bulging black briefcases had begun to rise out of the steam-blooming subway station at Broadway and Wall Street.

They were the appointed drones of New York 's financial district, the straight-salary employees who understood abstract accounting principles and fine legal points but perceived little else about the Street and its black magic. These unfortunates couldn't make the intuitive leap to the larger truth that on Wall Street millions were made not by accepting a fixed salary, but by taking a 10, 20, or 50 percent
vig
on somebody else's thousands, on somebody else's hundreds of millions.

By seven-thirty gum-popping secretaries were slouching off the buses arriving from Staten Island and Brooklyn. Aside from their habitual gum chewing, some of the secretaries looked impressively chic, almost elegant, that Friday morning.

As the ornate golden arms on the Trinity Church clock solemnly reached eight o'clock, every main and side street of the financial district was choked with thick, hypertense pedestrian traffic, as well as with buses and honking cabs.

More than nine hundred and fifty thousand people were being melted into less than half a square mile of outrageously expensive real estate, seven solid stone blocks where billions were bought and sold every workday-still the unsurpassed financial capital of the world.

It was too late to stop the morning's regular migration. The slim possibility had disintegrated in a frantic series of telephone calls between the commissioner's office and various powerful precinct chiefs. It had petered out into a nightmare of impossible logistics and mounting panic.

At that moment a wraithlike black man, Abdul Calvin Mohammud, was calmly entering the bobbing parade of heads and winter hats on Broad Street, just south of Wall. As he walked within the spirited crowd, he found himself noticing corporate flags waving colorfully from the massive stone buildings. The flags signaled BBH and Company, the National Bank of North America, Manufacturers Hanover, the Seaman's Bank. The flags were like crisp sails driven by strong East River winds.

Calvin Mohammud continued up the steep hill toward Wall Street. He was hardly noticed. But then the messenger caste usually wasn't. They were invisible men, props only.

Today, like every other workday, Calvin Mohammud wore a thigh-length, pale gray clerk's tunic with a frayed armband that read VETS MESSENGERS. On both sides of the words were fierce Eighty-second Airborne Division eagles.

But none of that was noticed, either.

Calvin Mohammud didn't look like it now, but in Vietnam and Cambodia he'd been a first-rate Kit Carson army scout. He'd won a Distinguished Service Cross, then the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life. After returning to the United States in 1971, Mohammud had been further rewarded by a grateful society with jobs as a porter at Penn Station, as a delivery boy for Chick-Teri, and as a baggage carrier at LaGuardia Airport.

Calvin Mohammud, Vets 11, slung his heavy messenger's bag off his shoulder as he reached the graffiti-covered news kiosk at the corner of Broadway and Wall. He tapped out a Kool and lit up behind a plume of yellow flame.

Slouched in a nearby doorway, Vets 11 casually reached into his shoulder bag and slid out a standard U.S. Army field telephone. Still concealed in the deep cloth bag was a sixteen-inch machine pistol, along with half a dozen 40-mm antipersonnel grenades.

“Contact.” He moved back into the cold building shadows, then whispered into the field telephone. “This is Vets Eleven at the stock exchange. I'm at the northeast entrance, off Wall… Everything's very nice and peaceful at position three… No police in sight. No armed resistance anywhere. Almost looks too easy. Over.”

Vets 11 took another short drag on his dwindling cigarette. He calmly peered around at the noisy hustle and bustle that was so characteristic of Wall Street on a weekday.

Broad daylight. What an amazing, completely unbelievable scene-what an apocalyptic firefight would be coming down here at five o'clock. He began to smile, exposing crooked yellow teeth. This was going to be so sweet, so satisfying and right.

At eight-thirty, Calvin Mohammud carefully wound a tattered strip of cloth around a polished brass door handle at the back entrance of the all-powerful New York Stock Exchange-a proud, beautiful green band.

Green Band started savagely and suddenly, as if meteors had been hurtled down with malevolent intensity on New York City. It blew out two-story-tall windows, shattered asphalt roofs, and shook whole streets in the vicinity of Pier 54-56 on West Street between Twelfth and Fifteenth streets. It all came in an enormous white flash of painful, blinding light.

At approximately nine-twenty that morning, Pier 54-56 was a sudden fiery caldron, a blast of flame that raked the air and spread with such rapid intensity that even the Hudson River seemed to be spurting colossal columns of fire, some at least four hundred feet high.

Dense hydrocarbon clouds of smoke billowed over West Street like huge open black umbrellas. Six-foot-long shards of glass and unguided missiles of molten steel launched themselves, flying upward, in eerie, tumbling slow motion. And as the river winds suddenly shifted, there were other-worldly glimpses of the glowing, hot-metal skeleton that was the pier itself.

The blistering fireball had erupted and spread in less than sixty seconds.

It was precisely as the Green Band warning had said it would be: an unspeakable sound-and-light show, a ghostly demonstration of promised terrors to come…

Inside a police surveillance helicopter quivering and bumping on serrated upcurrents of hot smoke, New York Mayor Arnold Ostrow and Police Commissioner Michael Kane were shocked beyond words. Both understood that one of New York 's worst nightmares was finally coming true.

This time one of the thousands of routinely horrifying threats to New York was real. Radio listeners and TV viewers all over New York would soon hear the unprecedented message:

“This is
not
a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.”

At 10:35 on the morning of December 4, more than seven thousand dedicated capitalists-DOT system clerks, youthful pages with their jaunty epaulets and floppy Connecticut Yankee haircuts, grimly determined stockbrokers, bond analysts, and supervisors with bright-green jackets were busily, if somewhat nonchalantly, promenading through the three jam-packed main rooms of the New York Stock Exchange.

The twelve elevated ticker-tape TV monitors in the busy room were spewing stock symbols and trades comprehensible only to the trained eyes of exchange professionals. The day's volume, if it was only an average Friday, would easily exceed a hundred fifty million shares.

No doubt the original forebears, the first bulls and bears, had been ferocious negotiators and boardroom masters. Their descendants, however, their mostly thin-blooded heirs, were not particularly adroit at money changing.

The heirs were a strikingly homogenous group, for the most part smug and vainglorious bean counters; they all looked blood-related and tended toward red-faced baby fat or an almost tubercular gauntness. Their pale blue eyes looked like marbles, round and bulging, with a distant vagueness in them.

Moreover, the heirs were standing by helplessly while American business was losing “World War III,” as the most recent fight over the world's economy had sometimes been called. They were quietly, though quite rapidly, surrendering world economic leadership to the Japanese, the Germans, and the Arab world.

At 10:57 on Friday morning, the bell-which had once actually been a brass fire bell struck by a rubber mallet and still signaled the official beginning of trading at 10:00 A.M. sharp and end of trading at 4:00 P.M.-went off inside the New York Stock Exchange. The bell sounded with all the shock value of a firework popping in a cathedral.

Absolute silence followed. Shocked silence.

Then came uncontrollable buzzing, frantic rumor-trading. Almost three minutes of unprecedented confusion and chaos on the exchange floor.

Finally, there was the deep and resonant voice of the stock exchange manager blaring over the antiquated PA system.

“Gentlemen… ladies… the New York Stock Exchange is officially closed… Please leave the floor. Please leave the trading floor immediately. This is not a bomb scare. This is an actual emergency! This is a serious police emergency!”

Outside the heavy stone-and-steel entranceway to the Mobil Building on East Forty-second Street, a series of personal stretch limousines-Mercedeses, Lincolns, Rolls-Royces-were arriving and departing with dramatic haste.

Important-looking men, most of them in dark overcoats, and a few women hurriedly got out of their limousines and entered the building's familiar deco lobby. Upstairs on the forty-second floor, other CEOs and presidents of the major Wall Street banks and brokerage houses were already gathered inside the exclusive Pinnacle Club.

The luxurious main dining room of the private club, which was set up for lunch with crisp white linens and shining silver and crystal, had been commandeered for the emergency meeting. Several of the dark-suited executives stood before floor-to-ceiling nonglare windows, which faced downtown. They looked dazed and disoriented. None of them had ever experienced anything remotely like this, nor had they ever expected to.

The view was a spectacular and chilling one, down uneven canyons to lower Manhattan, all the way to the pencil pocket of skyscrapers that was the financial center itself. About halfway, at Fourteenth Street, there were massive police barricades. Police buses, EMS ambulances, and a paradelike crowd could be seen waiting, watching toward Wall Street as if they were studying some puzzling work of art in a midtown museum.

“They haven't even bothered to reestablish contact with us. Not since six this morning,” said Secretary of the Treasury Walter O'Brien. “What the hell are they up to?”

Standing stiffly among a small group of prominent Wall Street executives, George Firth, the attorney general of the United States, was quietly lighting his pipe. He appeared surprisingly casual and controlled, except that he'd given up smoking more than three years before.

“They certainly were damn clear when it came to stating their deadline. Five minutes past five. Five minutes past five or what? What do the bastards want from us?” The attorney general's pipe went out, and he relit it, looking exasperated. The closest observers noticed the nervous tremors in his fingers.

A somber-looking businessman from Lehman Brothers named Jerrold Gottlieb looked at his wristwatch. “Well, gentlemen, it's one minute past five…” He was about to add something but left it unsaid.

They were all in unfamiliar territory now, where things couldn't be properly articulated.

“They've been extremely punctual up to now. Obsessive about getting details and schedules perfect. They'll call. I wouldn't worry, they'll call.”

The speaker was the vice president of the United States, who'd been rushed from the United Nations to the nearby Mobil Building. Thomas More Elliot was a stern man with the look of an Ivy League scholar. His harshest critics carped that he was a Brahmin who was out of touch with the complexities of contemporary America. He'd spent the better part of his public career with the State Department, traveling extensively in Europe during the turbulent sixties, then in South America through the seventies. And now this.

For the next few minutes everyone was quiet, tense.

This tingling silence in the club's dining room was all the more frightening because there were so many highly articulate men in the room-the senior American business executives, used to having their own way, used to being listened to and obeyed, almost without question. Now they were virtually powerless, not used to the frustration and tension that this terrifying mystery had thrust into their lives. And their awesome power had distilled itself into a sequence of small, distinct noises:

A throat being cleared.

Ice crackling in a glass.

Tapping of fingers.

Madness. The thought seemed to echo in the room.

The most fearsome urban terrorism had finally struck deep inside the United States, right at the heart of America 's economic power.

There were anxious, repeated glances at the glinting faces of Rolex, Cartier, and Piaget wristwatches.

What did Green Band want?

What was the outrageous ransom for Wall Street to be?

Edward Palin, the seventy-seven-year-old chief executive of one of the largest investment firms, slowly backed away from the darkly reflective picture windows. He sat down on a Harvard chair pulled up beside one of the dining tables and, in a poignant gesture, put his head between his gray pinstriped knees. He felt faint; it was too embarrassing to watch. Were they about to lose everything now?

Twenty seconds left.

“Please call. Call, you bastards,” the vice president muttered.

It seemed like thousands of emergency sirens were screaming, a peculiar high-low wail, all over New York City. It was the first time the emergency warning system had been seriously in use since 1963 and the nuclear war scares.

Finally it was five minutes past five.

The sudden, terrifying realization struck every person in the room-they weren't going to call again!

They weren't going to negotiate at all.

Without any further warning, Green Band was going to strike.

Washington, D.C.

“A fast recap for you,” said Lisa Pelham, the president's chief of staff, an efficient, well-organized woman who'd been trained at Harvard and spoke in the clipped manner of one whose mind was used to making succinct outlines from mountains of information.

“By noon, all trading was stopped on the New York and all regional exchanges in the U.S. There is no trading in London, Paris, Geneva, Bonn. The key New York businesspeople are meeting right now at the Pinnacle Club in the Mobil Building.

“All the important securities and commodities exchanges have ceased trading around the world. The unanswered question is the same everywhere. What's the nature of the demands we are secretly negotiating?” Lisa Pelham paused and stroked a strand of hair away from her oval face. “Everyone believes we're negotiating with somebody, sir.”